mottö
by Saurischian
Summary: Cloud can take care of himself, despite the guilt, despite the pain. But when he goes missing for several months, it's Tifa who can't handle it. Nominated for Best Het Romance in the Genesis Awards!
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from FFVII. –sniff- At least I can say the story's mine.**

_Prologue_

_I know what I have done. I have stopped. I have not only stopped eating, sleeping, fulfilling the daily requirements that mark me as a person, a living, breathing woman. I have stopped thinking. This is because thinking hurts. My brain begins to hum as the thought process fires the nerves. My chest tightens, and I cannot breathe; though my eyes are not seeing anything, they start to tear up. I have cried too much—I do not want to cry anymore._

_            I have stopped moving. I no longer care what goes on around me. I have stopped feeling, because there is no point to it. Sensations no longer appeal to me. There can be nothing in my sight that makes me happy. There is nothing in the world that can induce joy in me. When I hear voices that are not my own, I do not listen. Words are not for me to hear. My mouth is dry, and I cannot taste. Smells do not register, and I am not capable of opening my eyes; I do not want to see the world._

_            I do not want to see the world, because it is ugly. It is cold-hearted. It is cruel. The world has lost my trust, and the levity I once saw in those around me, the hope I once saw in the infinite stars, have all been stolen. They no longer matter to me._

_            I am dead. I have no connection with the living, waking world save for my body. I have died, faded away until there was nothing left. Despite my wishes, I was not able to leave myself behind, still possess the terrestrial limits I was born with. My lungs are still inhaling, and my heart still beats beneath my ribs, yet none of these things register. There is nothing that can awaken me._

_            I have fallen asleep, sunk below the waves without any intention of resurfacing._

_            And I am fine with this._

_            I am fine with all of this. Because I am free. I am free from thinking. I am free from dreaming._

_            In this new, unexplored land of unconsciousness, I have found that my mother does not haunt me, and the nightmares that have dutifully trailed by my every waking movement are, to say the least gone. I do no have to worry about catching the man who killed my father hiding in the shadows of my own bedroom, and my friends…two lives of the hundreds he stole, no longer stare at me with black, sympathetic eyes._

_            I am not reminded constantly that Cloud is dead._

_            He is not dead like I am dead. It is not the same thing. He is _really_ dead. His soul has gone. While I am still trapped inside this once-beautiful, no longer lovable frame, he is truly liberated. He is truly free._

_            But I will not think about it. I have cried too much. I can sink, now, and leave. No one will miss me. They should be happy. I am dead. I am free._

To be continued…really. I'll try, not matter how long it takes. ~Raine


	2. Hello Another Way

_Chapter I :: Hello Another Way_

Although the weatherman had said the sun would come out that day, it had yet to make an appearance. And though the air in the streets hadn't dropped to the daily low of sixty-five, the wind chill—which had remained unaccounted for during the morning report—made it feel at least ten degrees colder.

But that was Junon for you.

Yet after the nine-hour journey through the mountains surrounding North Corel, across the sea splitting the two continents into the Junon area, my legs were grateful for the space the wide streets provided. Traces of heavy fever still occasionally flared beneath my skin, and the breeze was a welcome one as it calmed the furious tides of heat throughout my body. I still wasn't completely healthy, still showed signs of impending illness; even as had I climbed the irate green chocobo that would take me over the mountain range, fighting the vertigo and straightening myself on the saddle, the doctor of the village continued to insist that I was still not well. _Certainly _not for extensive travel.

If I could walk, I reasoned, I was perfectly fine.

Up the elevator from Junon Harbor, one would catch a glimpse of the last aquamarine waves before the black asphalt spread throughout. Junon wasn't a miraculous city, was not destined for the hideous greatness Midgar had once possessed, but after Meteor, people had needed a place to congregate, to regroup and spawn. The second largest city in the world, having suffered little damage and no long-term effects, had been the perfect candidate. And because of the sudden influx of refugees, Junon had bloomed and spread like an enormous flower of pavement and metal and human. It was overcast and windy, and every inch was teeming with life.

I had never really liked people, never had an innate appreciation for their company. They needed and demanded more attention and effort than they deserved, wanted more than I cared to give them, desired time I didn't have. I had never been very social—unless you considered picking fights with neighborhood kids social—and I was never congenial when it came to dealing with strangers. As I passed the groups and pairs and individuals, all shouting and jostling their way from one place to the next, I regretted over the fact that my disease was a foreign one, a virus, and could not be transmitted from person to person. It truly was a shame. The only appeal cities had to me was the actuality that I could get lost among the throngs, disappear if I wanted and become invisible.

I had wanted that once. I had done fairly well in that respect, hiding in towns where no one could recognize my face, know me for who I was. And I had stayed in those small, barely populated towns, mulling over my life. But now I was here, battling the masses. Because Barret had said so.

Over the phone, I hardly recognized his voice as his own. He had been, at the time, worried, upset, and absolutely, positively fuming that I had not kept in contact with him in the past year. I didn't know why. I didn't know why he was in Junon as opposed to North Corel Village. All I knew was that when he said 'immediately,' something was very wrong.

It was three months ago, when I had stumbled into the town's border with an outrageous fever and double-vision, looking for him. But Barret wasn't where he was supposed to be, and I hadn't had time to phone him in Junon with the number some local had given me before I passed out.

> I remained passed out and unconscious for several weeks.

So he was here. He had either bought an apartment, or rented one. It was close to where the Sister Ray had once stood, in all of its terrible destructive glory. As I started up the steps, a thought came—Tifa had mentioned living with Barret in Corel. As with all the other members of Avalanche, I hadn't spoken with her in over a year and a half. Yet the excitement I should have felt at the thought of seeing her again was quelled by the increasingly violent butterflies in my stomach. Barret had not once mentioned her in the two brief conversations we'd had over the phone. He had been too furious, too frustrated. Too panicked. 

Fifth floor, take a left down the steel grey hallway, 628B; by the time I found myself staring at the apartment door in front of me, the paper with his directions on it was nothing more than a crumpled shred with what had been writing smeared on it. I gripped it inside a tight fist as I pressed on the small, round doorbell. It chimed, rather loudly, and almost immediately a responsive thumping came from the other side, inside.

I gazed forward, expecting to see Barret's wide, square features inches above my face. Instead I caught sight of the kitchen behind the door, and glanced down to meet Marlene's brilliant green eyes. They grew wide as she registered my face, and a faint smile appeared before her father's heavy steps resonated down the hallway.

"Stupid son of a bitch." Marlene moved away so I could enter, and, realizing that this was as close to a welcome as I would get, I put my bag down.

"Hello to you too," I said dryly. 

"Where the _hell_ have you been?" I suddenly felt like a child, being scolded for coming home late.

"In Corel, looking for you. Where have _you_ been?" Sensing the heating waves of conflict, whizzing through the air like sparks of electricity, Marlene quickly and discreetly left the room. Barret, as I got a look at him, had wrinkles in his face he hadn't possessed the last I saw of him; it was as though he had aged two whole decades in the two years we'd last seen each other. He seemed tired some how, exhausted as if he hadn't slept in several days.

Waiting for me.

"Here. I—we…live here now. For the bein'."

"Barret, what's going on? You said you needed me for something…" He waved his hand in front of my face, silencing me. My stomach churned, and I knew instinctively that it was not a symptom of the jungle sickness. But the question wouldn't rest: where in the world was Tifa?

The black man watched me, long and grave and sympathetic; the fire of the moment had died within him, and he no longer had the energy to continue. His brown eyes were dark and sorrowful, weighed down with an essence I had never seen before in him. A countenance of pure, unmistakable sadness. Simple hopelessness. All he could do now was wait for me, as he had been waiting.

He pointed to the living room, towards a burgundy couch. My intestines were doing somersaults as I followed him in and sat down.

"What happened?" I asked again. Barret sank into a wide armchair across from me, proceeding to avoid looking at my face.

"Everyone thinks your dead," he mumbled, so I could barely hear him. "_I_ thought you were dead, until you called last week…" The couch wasn't at all uncomfortable, but I found myself sitting erect, unable to relax.

"What _happen_ed? Where is Tifa…?" The words were slow in coming; I almost held them back, for fear of the answer. His head came up at the mention of her name, yet still he couldn't bring himself to look at my face. He became immersed in the coffee table, glass-topped and silver-rimmed.

"She's…look, Cloud, a lot has gone down since you disappeared. One day I jus'…got a phone call from Calin—" The villager who had given me Barret's number. I nodded, to myself. "He said somethin'—as monster attack'd you in the forest. That you got sick. He called…to tell me that you were dead…"

"But I _wasn't_ dead!" I interjected. "I could take care of myself. Everyone should have know that…" He glanced at me sharply.

"You say he was lying? How the hell was I supposed to know, not havin' seen or heard from you since…" He stopped. "Goddammit, I didn't know what the hell was goin' on! He told me you had come in lookin' for me, and that you went unconscious for a while."

"That doesn't mean I died," I said. "Just because someone's in a coma doesn't—"

"He said you'd stopped breathin'," he went on, "that they couldn't revive ye'. No one knew what was goin'on." I sighed, and slumped back into the pillows. "That wuz jus' the beginnin'. That's when Tifa really started gettin' sick."

"…Sick…?" My heart froze in my chest. Barret was not staring at the coffee table; he was not even in the room with me. The memory had taken hold, his voice finding a monotony that signaled his entrance.

"O'course, 'afore that she knew you were fine. _She_ knew you could take care of ye'rself. But, I guess, somethin' inside her couldn't let go a the feelin' you'd been hurt, that you were in danger s'mehow. She started worryin' o'er stupid, little things, at first. Then, I didn't think it was too serious, nothin' to worry about. She had a lota stress at the time. I jus' figured it wuz all bringin' 'er down…

"Then I got that phone call." He found present, and stared down at me. "I didn' want t'tell 'er." For a moment, I thought he was going to start weeping, right there in front of me. "She died then, Tifa. I mean, she was still alive an' all, body-wise, but her 'eart…it went with you."

"Barret," I spoke more calmly than I felt, not wanting my voice to give my fear away. "Why did they call so early? Why didn't he call when I started breathing again…when I woke up?"

He shook his head. "I don' know! Maybe…damn, it was prob'bly his grudge kickin' in. 'Cause I couldn't stay like I was suppos'd te'." So all of Avalanche save for Barret thought I was dead because one arrogant man still couldn't get over his grudge. Wonderful. "She stopped eatin', 'came thin as I'd e'er seen 'er," he continued. "She didn't sleep, 'cause a the nightmares..."

"What nightmares?" My voice startled him: he had forgotten I was there, listening.

"The first a'her doctors said it was narcolepsy, 'cause a the stress."

"Narcolepsy?"

"Sure. She'd fall asleep at odd times—washin' the dishes, or e'en once in the shower." He drew breath, prepared. "But it was always the nightmares. They were the worst." Silence. "She told me about it once, when she was still talking. She'd wake up in the middle a the night, open 'er eyes, see the room, y'know, as she usually did. Only, she couldn't move, not a muscle—some sort a sleep paralysis. She couldn't do a thing, jus' lay in bed an' blink, waiting until she could move again. Then she'd see 'em. The ghosts…"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Of course I had heard of narcolepsy, of the random bouts of unconsciousness, and the sleep paralysis was pretty much self-explanatory. But seeing dead people in her bedroom?

"An', the time she told me, it was when she saw you, standin' next t'Aeris."

It was as though the world had disappeared: all that remained were Barret and I. The planet was insignificant. The house was completely silent, as if Marlene and the other boarders of the building had all disappeared, leaving me to digest alone what Barret was describing to me. As if they too suffered from narcolepsy.

"You jus' stood there, starin' at her. The both you an' Aeris vanished. Then she woke up." He closed his eyes. "She didn' fall back asleep, didn' sleep at night anymore. A few naps durin' the day, but that wuz all." As he opened his eyes again, blinked, his brow creased with obvious accusation, though resigned. "You waited too long."

O.o I actually published a second chapter for something. –gasp- There were a few problems with the plot-building here, but hopefully they'll pan out later. Sorry about the cursing, I'll change the rating, just to be safe. I try and keep it as PG as I can, but I won't promise anything. Hope you like it. Please read and review! Raine


	3. King of Pain

_Chapter II :: King of Pain_

"I _was_ dying…" My voice sounded unfamiliar to me; deeper; hoarse. How close had I actually come? I realized I didn't know. I had lost more than a month of my life to a raging disease and the dreams that had accompanied it. "Hmm." Somehow, the situation was almost ironic, in a way. "He must've leapt at the chance to tell you one of your friends died." Fortunately for me, the other citizens of the village had been feeling humanitarian at the time—or at least hadn't felt any particular hatred towards myself. They had saved my life, keeping me alive while Tifa slowly died…

I closed my eyes.

"I was attacked, in the forest. I killed it, but I was struck, here." I motioned generally to my chest—there actually was a specific scar that ran from my left shoulder down to my lower ribs, a jagged remnant of the deep gash that had eagerly become infected during my struggle to find Barret. It was ugly, but had been even more so while the illness ravaged my body, bleeding uncontrollably and then pussing over as the infection progressed. "I caught some weird disease from it. I was out most of the time."

Neither of us said anything. Despite my apprehension, I admitted he still hadn't revealed to me Tifa's location. Regardless of my fear, I needed to know.

"Where is she?" I tried desperately not to expect anything.

Barret's head snapped up, abruptly snapped from his thoughts. Once again his face obtained an countenance of such morbid acquiescence as to be almost unrecognizable. "I 'ad so many doctors see her, to help wi' everythin', not jus' the narcolepsy. Then, she…she wuz in Marlene's bedroom, makin' the bed or somethin'. Marlene 'eard a thump, and went to go check t'make sure she didn't hurt herself. We jus' figured she'd fallen asleep again." He shook his head, to himself. "She didn't wake up."

I couldn't remember breathing then, when he said that. My heart ceased, and I could not think clearly.

"I 'ad her move here, because of the hospitals. I've 'ad too much of these doctors," he commented wearily. "All of 'em in the city said it was an emotional breakdown. Two were able t'narrow it down as a stroke."

"But…she was so young…" I whispered.

How had I let it get this bad? Why had I even mentioned Barret to that man? As much as I wanted to believe the entire predicament was Calin's fault, I knew unconsciously it wasn't. I had taken my sweet time while Tifa wasted away, unknowing of what was happening halfway across the world. How could I have known? Why hadn't I tried to find a way? Because I had wanted my best friend to have a nervous breakdown, mourning over me?

I hadn't kept my promise.

"Where is she?"

Barret didn't respond immediately—judging by his tunneled stare in my direction, he was attempting to judge my reaction to the answer. "Down a few streets. On 22nd Avenue." I hadn't a very recent map of Junon in my head, yet even I knew that this vague address was not that of a cemetery.

"Where?" He made a face, as if already regretting calling me there, inviting me into the conversation, opening himself up to such a question.

"The Associative Hospital of Junon."

I felt the muscles in my face go slack; all connections in my brain broke save for two: two thoughts chiming over and over, almost mocking in their repetitiveness.

_She's not dead. She's still alive…_

Wait.

The Associative Hospital of Junon? But that was…

"A mental hospital?" My eyes focused in on him; he didn't appear completely guilty, only slightly so, which, considering, was most likely due to his own unease over my reaction. "You put Tifa in a _mental hospital_?"

"Now don' get all angry wi' me. I said I didn' know what wuz goin' on. Everything wuz jus' chaos—first it wuz _you_, and then Tifa…all the doctors told me it'wuz the best thing for 'er…" I stood up, not entirely sure what it was I planned to do, but realizing the full extent of the anger, the disbelief that rose to the surface, hot as the fever that had held me for so long.

"'The best thing?!' Locking her up with a bunch of insane loonies?! How could _that_ possibly be the '_best thing_?!'" His dark eyes narrowed into slits.

"There's nothin' anyone can do 'bout 'er. I _said_ I've 'ad every single goddamned specialist to look at 'er and not one of 'em could do anythin' about it! I'm at the end of my rope here!" His deep voice boomed throughout the house, making my skull vibrate. But it was something that would not stop the waves of frustration building up in my mind. I now knew where she was—and that she was alive—but it wasn't enough.

"How can you say that?! You just put her away with those…_people_, like she doesn't matter anymore! And what did _she_ have to say about that?! What does _she_ think about being dumped off in an insane asylum?!"

The floor trembled as he straightened, towering over me. "She _doesn't_ think, Cloud. She _can't_ think. That stroke killed 'er! She's completely _braindead_!" I stopped shouting, long enough to calm myself down. His breathing was irregular, sharp and broken. "I didn' have the things to take care of her in Corel, an' I didn' 'ave those things here, either. _They_ do. They can take care of 'er, b'cause she can't do any of those things h'rself…" I sat back down, stupefied.

"Braindead…" The word rang in my head, overpowering the joyful revelation of her being alive. "Why…?" Barret shook his head, and slumped back into the armchair. He stared thoughtfully at me, though I didn't have the peace of mind to take heed to the attention.

"No one knows exactly what happen'd. It just…like some switch had turned off." He paused. "They said she can't hear anythin', or notice it when I visit 'er. A lota people said I should just let 'er die, that it would be easier on all of us." He gave me a look that spoke for itself: he wasn't planning on doing anything of the sort. Just as his daughter had given me the same expression. Silently both of them hoped that I could bring her back; as I had driven her away.

"I want to see her." Even before the words escaped me, I realized just how true they were. I really wanted to see her, despite everything Barret had just explained to me. I needed to see her. He shot me a skeptical look, unsure that I was ready to handle such a sight. After a moment, he nodded.

"Awright. Tomorrow. Visiting hours are over already—"

"Papa?" Both of us turned, as Marlene popped her red head through the doorframe. "Will Cloud be staying for dinner?" We glanced at each other.

"Yes."

I stared off as Marlene withdrew from our conversation. How old was she now—six, maybe? I could loosely remember how much the young girl had respected Tifa, having no mother to take care of her. And now, now that her only female role model was gone, how was _she_ handling it?

Better than any of us, I figured.

Barret watched me watching his daughter. He coughed, breaking me from my reverie. He stood up with some trouble, having added several years to his age in the past hour. "You'll sleep on the couch."

The plot thickens…This was written faster than I thought it would be—it's probably to effect of listening to "We Drink Ritalin" over and over again (really, that song is quite catchy). So, um, yeah, here you go. Thankies to those who reviewed. It really motivated me. Raine__


	4. Uninvited

_Chapter III :: Uninvited_

_The wind whipped past, screeching as it fled through the shafts and grates of the airship. I gazed longingly at the ground below, wishing for something but not being entirely sure what it was. I didn't want to move forward, to keep enlarging the distance between me and whatever lay behind. I wanted Cid to stop the plane, so I could get off._

_ "Whatcha lookin' at?" I turned, startled, to find two large, amber eyes smiling up at me._

_ I shrugged, returned to the spinning scenery._

_ "Nothing." She sighed, and walked up next to me, leaning over the rail. The breeze played with her hair, sent it flying about her face as though she was floating in water. It made me want to tie it back, frightened of the image it sparked in me._

_ "Vincent and Yuffie are gone," she said slowly. "We're almost to Cosmo Canyon." Had I just heard a twinge of sadness? I glanced at her._

_ "Hmm." Her chin rested on the metal railing. From where I stood, I couldn't see her expression._

_ "You have no one to go back to. Where are you going to go?" The question chanted itself in my mind. Of course I'd thought about it before, yet now I felt the need to reply with words she wanted to hear. To comfort the sorrowful undertones in her voice._

_ "I…don't know. Somewhere. Eventually." It was insufficient; it wasn't enough. "And you, Tifa. Where are you going to live?"_

_ The silence that followed worried me._

_ "I don't know either." Regardless of the depression that was so blatantly obvious, she forced a grin. "I'll think of something. I've been homeless before, after all." Young. Alone. Orphaned at fifteen. "Barret says I can live with him, in North Corel," she said, after a moment. "I don't really want to. I can't help feeling like I'm intruding on them." She closed her eyes. For one tense second, neither of us said anything. "You'll keep in contact, won't you?" I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came. I closed it again, shook my head._

_ "I…I'll try."_

_ She turned to me then, her whole body twisting to shove the aura of bleakness and misery and pain in my face, threatening to overwhelm me. I had never seen such a countenance on _any_one before. Her hair had come out of the band that had held it, and she bent to pick up to the tie. Black locks dropped in front of her face, hiding the tears._

_ "I'll miss you." Once again: deficient, unsatisfactory. But she didn't protest, didn't say anything further—she could barely bring herself to look at me, compelling one more rueful smile before disappearing into the Control Room._

_--_

There was no moon that night. Even in the city, the chirping crickets and peepers in the forests surrounding Junon could be heard. Even as I lay on top of the blankets Marlene had provided, their rhythmic, incessant chattering reached me, just slightly comforting. They were a salvation, a periodic breaking of the ringing in my head. I couldn't sleep, for fear, for guilt. And because of the fever that made me sweat, shattering the insulation of sheets and comforters; for a moment I would be too hot to even breathe, and then, as a gentle breeze sifted through the open window in the living room, I would scramble under the bedclothes to keep from freezing to death. Apart from my scattered breathing, at two in the morning the rest of the house remained silent.

What would Tifa do when she saw me?

_She won't "do" _any_thing, _I reminded myself. _She's brain-dead._

_ Brain-dead_.

I closed my eyes again, a futile attempt to block out the images that stormed in unwanted. Still-shots of her smiling, pictures of her speaking. The moments with her voice—how many times it had brought me back to the land of the living, back from my own unconscious. Every memory I had of her crushed my mind, suffocating it with the possibilities of what would never be again.

How many nights had she cried over me? How many minutes of every day had she thought of me, buried six feet under?

I shuddered, hugging myself. How many times had I been dead to her in all the years she had never heard from me? I realized, with a sudden, undeniable honesty, that I had put her through this circumstance more times than I could count with one hand. Since I had left her in Nibelheim, after the town was destroyed and I disappeared into the mountains; the day I met Aeris, leading Tifa to believe I had died in a mako reactor explosion, then again after I gave the Black Materia to Sephiroth… The list went on and on as the clock in the kitchen clicked. All throughout our lives I had played this detrimental tango with her, and she had put up with it, never once countering back, never once dissenting my deprecating behavior.

It was only a matter of time…

Why? Because…because that was simply _Tifa_; it was in her personality…

Frustrated that I—the one person who should have known the answer to that question—hadn't come up with anything more satisfying than "her personality," and unable to prevent the waves of sickness and blame from battering my conscience, I swung my legs out of my suffocating cocoon. The wood floor was cold beneath my feet, and a particularly rough wind strung gooseflesh along my arms. But I wasn't tired. I was more frightened than anything else, scared for once in my life of what I would witness tomorrow. I needed to see Tifa more than I actually wanted to. I didn't _want_ to see what I had done.

Streams of pale yellow light filtered in through the kitchen window from the streetlamps outside, casting superficial shadows on corners and in crevices. Yet the whole house lay peaceful, relatively quiet. I padded past the table, and turned, glancing down the hallway. I hadn't been given a tour of the three-bedroom apartment, and I could only tell Barret's room by the snoring that grew louder with each step I took. Marlene's door had a small pink sign on it, declaring it with bright red letters as her own. Across from the bathroom was another door, closed. I stopped, standing with my nose nearly touching the dark wood. No sound came from within: it didn't take a genius to guess that the room was empty.

I reached out, tentatively grasping the doorknob, as if I expected to be electrocuted. The tiny springs made faint creaking noises as I turned it, and pushed the door open to face the darkness inside.

It was like walking into a tomb that hadn't been entered in several centuries, smelling faintly of dust just beginning to settle, and of stale perfume. My hand fumbled along the wall for a light switch, and in an instant the small area was illuminated, temporarily blinding me in the process.

It was, indeed, a bedroom. Meant to accommodate only one person, there was just enough space for a twin bed in the far corner, a dresser, and desk. Unlike the kitchen and parlor, there was a genuine Wutain rug under my bare feet, old and thick. I inhaled the forgotten scents, my brain making the connection quicker than I could respond to the stimuli.

_Tifa…_

It seemed almost sacrilegious to be in there, prying around her bedroom behind her back—even if she _wouldn't_ know the difference; it didn't seem right, fair. But as I traced the edge of her perfume bottles, and scanned various piles of paper with her immaculate cursive on them, the recollections that returned with each touch were almost intoxicating, wonderful. Things, aspects I had never cared to notice before flooded my senses, pictures I had never taken time to consider in depth swarming in.

And I knew that if I didn't do something, regardless of what I saw tomorrow, those objects would remain unused and forgotten, left in this room to fade and decompose and eventually disappear—like the memories, they would dissipate until there was nothing left, no trace that anyone had ever lived there, that someone had even existed within these walls.

I _had_ to do something.

I rounded the furniture until I made it to the bed. The bed that had hardly ever been used, if at all, before Tifa became too ill even to take care of herself… The bed where she had supposedly witness my ghost, along with Aeris, and with whoever dead decided to visit her in the small hours of the morning. The bed from which the nightmares had sprung, those that would eventually drive her to the edge.

_Brain-dead._

I collapsed onto the cushions, exhausted. Despite its unpleasant reputation, the mattress and bedclothes made for surprisingly—exceedingly—comfortable padding. I let myself fall back, and sank gently as I stared up at the ceiling.

_Tifa had slept in this bed._

When she was still sleeping, of course.

It was outrageously hot in that stuffy room, the door having stayed firmly closed for most of the time since Tifa had left; I flipped onto my stomach, to squander the molecules of heat that had attached themselves to my clothing. I buried my face in her pillow, breathing in her fragrance. The feeling it gave was overpowering, irresistible, an awareness of cleanness, of delicacy and beauty. Wholly feminine. I could feel my heart beating under my weight, pounding against the metal springs and cotton sheets. A foreign, rare flora—that was what she smelled like. Like something distant, faraway, unreachable, yet completely familiar, almost intrinsic. I closed my eyes, letting the aromas lift into my brain, taking me away…

* * *

I dunno…couldn't it be considered stalking? Snooping in someone's bedroom…creepy (even if it _is_ Cloud). Either way, I managed to avoid the actual "reunion" for another chapter. Don't you just love the suspense? Once again, please read and review. Domo arigato Raine


	5. Silence That Binds

_Chapter IV :: Silence That Binds_

"—oud? Cloud…?" I grunted, and batted at the hand on my shoulder.

"_Umph._ Just five more minutes…"

"Papa will be up soon. He'll be angry if he finds you in here." My eyes shot open, to meet the gentle stream of brightness that filtered in through the window; not yet strong enough to cast definite shadows, the sun hadn't come up above the horizon—the morning had begun less than an hour ago, and already I could feel the humidity on my skin. Marlene gazed down at me, her emotions hidden as always behind the childish façade of ignorance, of naïveté that denied her true character.

"What?" I glanced around at my surroundings—I could have sworn I went to bed on the couch in the living room… "Oh."

I propped myself up, running my hand through my hair, which had somehow picked up the pillow's smell. A grin played on her lips, and she sniffed, delicately.

"You might want to take a shower," she suggested, "before he gets a whiff of you."

"Is it really that bad?" The smile grew, then dulled.

"Papa's been really stressed out since Auntie Tifa got sick." For an instant, a look of desperation flashed in her eyes, her weakness that betrayed her age breaking through for less than a millisecond. "That's really why he wanted you here…please, help her." But it was an instant, that her front and barricade was reestablished. I considered it an honor—if an awkward, dismal one—a sign of ultimate respect, to see the child behind that guise. I returned the grin, to reassure her, and rose.

"I'll try…" My heart froze; trying wasn't good enough.

> Marlene continued the conversation, not noticing any change, unknowing.

"I haven't seen her, since Papa put her in the hospital." The loony bin. Insane asylum. Crazy house. "He said I couldn't—that I need to concentrate on school. Not to worry about things I couldn't do anything 'bout, b'cause there was nothing I could do…anyway."

It wasn't the truth, and both of us knew it.

My ruffled sheets were just as I had left them, wrinkled and sweeping dirt from the floor in the parlor. They were cold as I crawled back into them, chilling me. It had been warm in Tifa's bed, comfortable… I shivered slightly, thinking about what awaited me. As much as I needed an image in my mind, even a slight expectation of what was to come, I didn't have the slightest clue—the only information that had been revealed to me was her general condition, and nothing else.

_Brain-dead…_

Realizing after a half hour of staring at the gradually breaking dawn that I was not going to fall asleep again, I slowly got up and did as wise young Marlene had recommended. The shower was cold, biting to wake me fully, to shed away the layers of heat and flowers and atrophy that had rubbed into my flesh while I slept. In her room. My head hurt slightly, the beginnings of a much larger migraine to come. Barret was up and about as I stepped into the hallway, stealing a quick image of the door across from me. I pondered silently whether he had any intention of showing me the inside of that room officially, openly; it wasn't so much a matter of trust as it was simply, in his mind, would I be able to handle it?

His complexion had whitened several shades in the night, and he refused to make eye contact with me until after we had left the house, and were walking closer and closer to the hospital, to Tifa.

Less than a block away, Barret stopped, standing on the sidewalk and staring at me as though I were a small child, an innocent, uninformed little boy. A boy he was not used to dealing with—a son he did not want to have to face.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I didn't have any other choice, did I?

I nodded.

I tried not to expect anything as we entered the wide, air-conditioned building; I made furious attempts to keep my mind on the present, not the near future, as we stepped into the elevator that would take us to Tifa's floor. I didn't read the names of each level, wasn't compelled to know who else called this skyscraper home. Barret walked into the foyer, and immediately went for the receptionist who sat at a desk at the other end of the room. In an utter daze, bewildered for once by the reality of this new environment, I followed, taking in the white walls and dark grey chairs that aligned either side, without bothering to process that chairs were used to sit. When people waited, visiting. Their friends. Who had gone lost their minds. She was speaking to him, the receptionist, and he was nodding, smiling artificially. She was a young woman, perhaps slightly older than I was, and appeared as if she despised her job, wishing to be anywhere else but there. The greetings were short, as Barret introduced us. A few more words, and he had weaseled me out of the paperwork new visitors were usually required to sign. A guard opened a door I hadn't realized was there, and Barret, without hesitating, went inside.

It took me a moment to understand that I had to follow him.

If possible, the rec room was even a brighter shade of white than the foyer. I blinked, uncertain, and glanced around the room. I hadn't expected anything, yet the sight before me was something that stretched far beyond anything I could have imagined, went past everything I knew, everything I was familiar with.

This was the floor for those who were physically capable of caring for themselves. They stood or sat or lay and stared at whatever it was in front of them. As we walked, they didn't notice my captive gape, nor the fidgeting of my hands or the weakness in my legs. Only a few feet in front of me, Barret moved swiftly and silently, the wanting to get this day over with as quickly as possible emanating from him like a heavily applied cologne. Then he stopped, suddenly, and paused, in front of an occupied wheelchair. Despite the dread, and regardless of my presence beside him, he smiled, and clasped her tiny hand in his.

All I could do was stare.

She wasn't Tifa. It was that simple. The woman in the wheelchair was not the one I had grown up with, was not the one who had stolen my heart as a child. She was thin and pale, and remained ramrod still even when I moved next to Barret, in her full view. Her eyes, those that had once possessed only a love for life, were flat and emotionless—they stayed focused on the window on her left, yet she didn't see the steel of the buildings or the blue of the sky. She did not respond to his touch in the slightest, and what I thought would have been a shock for her, what should have ignited at least some of the fire that had died with me, did nothing. She gazed, and kept on gazing in spite of who kneeled in front of her.

_This_ was what it meant to be brain-dead.

_"…A lota people said I should jus' let 'er die, that it would be easier on all of us…"_ But it was too late for that. The news of my ephemeral journey into Limbo had attacked her without mercy, and had left nothing in its wake. Killing her would only remove the body she had left behind.

_It was only a matter of time._

I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to halt the onrush of guilt and pain that came with the image of this woman. Yet I continuously found myself searching for a glimmer of the shine that had been so dominant in her features. Where her eyes had once been the color of wine when held up to the sun, they were only brown. Her skin stretched across her bones, making it appear as though she were made out of paper maché. The hospital gown folded and shielded, hiding the hollows where there had been curves, and edges where there had been smoothness. Her hair fell flat and dull against her back. As Barret talked to this shell, this hollow doll of a woman I did not recognize, I never found her. For an eternity, I looked for consistency I had thought would always be there. For a lifetime I searched, and all my efforts were, ultimately, futile.

* * *

So sorry about the long wait! A lot of stuff has been keeping me from my computer the last few days. I had high expectations for this chapter, and it came out alright, I guess. Not perfect, but acceptable. The next chapter is going to be hell writing, 'cause it's mostly going to be a filler. I have some idea of what Cloud's going to do for the rest of the story, but I might change it, for fear of it being too…not cliché, but anti-climactic, or something like that. Meh. I'll think of something. I was also getting the idea of starting 'Paranoia' again, along with another story that's been pressing in the back of my mind, but I want to finish this before I start anything else, or I'll never finish either. Now I _have_ to finish this one, just as a personal goal. Thanks a bunch for all the reviews I got on the previous chapter. It really helped! Raine


	6. Awakening

_Chapter V :: Awakening_

I couldn't breathe. I hadn't eaten since breakfast that morning, and it was already three in the afternoon, yet I wasn't in the least bit hungry. My eyes stayed focused on the cement and tar under my mud-caked boots, leaving it to the other passerby and lampposts and cars to avoid me. Occasionally I would walk close enough to see Barret's heels flash in and out of my limited field of vision, and I would drop back behind, keeping up the distance between us. Since he had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk on the way _to_ the hospital, he hadn't said a word to me, and now on our way back to the apartment, neither of us said a word. I blinked, fighting the vertigo. Even in my deepest state of thought, the disease had not dissipated as _I_ had thought it would—I could still walk, but barely.

I couldn't feel my heart beating beneath my ribcage, and that worried me. My hands shook inside my pant pockets, as I thought. As I knew. As I remembered.

_"…Please, help her…"_ What could I do? How could I do anything at all? For the three months she had been that way—the way I had seen her, pallid and unmoving, her face and body frozen into an eternal pose—and now that I had shown up, did I expect her to suddenly awaken? Something inside me told me it wouldn't be that easy.

From my place constantly behind Barret, and with my view of his wide back, I hadn't a chance after we left Tifa to witness his expression as we exited the building; neither of us were eager for common interaction, and I wasn't sure I wanted to see what he was thinking in those large brown eyes. But Marlene took one look at her father and didn't bother to even glance in my direction. For the rest of the evening she set out cleaning and cooking supper, keeping herself busy to avoid both us men as much as humanly possible.

And when the two began a conversation at the table, I continuously found myself incapable of speech.

"Papa…?" Barret didn't answer, and I didn't move, both of us lost in thought. "I want to see Tifa."

To say he was stressed out was an understatement, and for a moment a look stretched across his face that suggested he would rather be comatose with Tifa than active with us, with the living. He blinked, and continued eating.

"No."

But giving up was not in her plans—after all, _I_ had gotten to see the young woman, and God knew I was less emotionally stable than she was.

"I want to see her! Cloud got to—"

"_Cloud_," responded the black man, slowly, his patience clearly being stretched, "is a guest. And he's known Tifa a lot longer than you." The answer he gave would have been inadequate for _me_, but it was his voice that quieted any objections I would have had towards the unreasonable answer. And it was Marlene's fight anyway, not mine, as everyone clearly recognized; I stayed still. He refocused on his plate, chewing meditatively.

The little girl's face scrunched up into an expression of rebellious dissatisfaction.

"I haven't seen her at all! She's _my_ friend too!"

"Marlene…"

"You're acting like she was only _your_ friend. But…_I_ miss her too." It occurred to me that Marlene did not know the full extent of Tifa's condition—not that way that either Barret or even I did, after witnessing it first hand: to save her fragile child's psyche, her father had tried to protect his daughter from the harsh reality of what had really become of her self-appointed mother-figure. "I haven't seen her since she went to the hospital. I want to see her!" Of course, she had to have heard his shouting, back when I was still ignorant of it, of everything.

_Brain-dead._

The chewing stopped. Barret swallowed, and I could see him forming his words in his mind. And then, I realized something I had never before seen in him, in all the near two years I had known and grown to befriend him: I saw him as a father. The fact had never truly hit me, and now, as he tried to lay down what was to be a crushing defeat on Marlene's part, I knew I couldn't commiserate with his struggle. I knew I didn't particularly _want_ to be able to sympathize with having to support and six-year old while at the same time providing for a surely hefty medical bill. I sat and I watched as he glanced up from his food, to stare at her, bearing his exhaustion like a last attempt for empathy. He sighed.

"There's nothin' t'see. She's asleep, just layin' in bed all day. She has a lota tubes in her arms, keeping 'er fed. Doctors say she won' wake up 'cause she's dreamin'," he explained. "There were a few signs of 'er wakin' up when she 'eard Cloud's voice. You'll see her when she wakes up. I promise." It was a comforting tale, whatever the lie that is was. I would have liked to believe it. For it to have been real.

For the second time in one day, I saw Marlene as the six-year old that she was. She took this information in, and after a few seconds of consideration accepted the fabrication as truth.

If only. If only it were that simple.

--

In the second, the transition from the last and final closing stages of sleep to the full awareness of being awake, I saw spots. That wasn't good, was it? It certainly wasn't normal. I blinked, soaking in the sunlight, and they disappeared. But still. I knew to take it slow as I crawled from the couch. And I made a special effort to watch my footing as I walked down the steps from the apartment, into the steaming, melting streets of Junon.

She was addicting. The woman in the wheelchair; the beautiful, hideous creature that had replaced the friend I had known. She was unavoidable in the ways I wanted her to be. I didn't like looking at her face, and usually kept my eyes towards anything that actually moved within the white confines of her new home. I couldn't leave her be because I felt guilty. I found myself constantly returning to see feed off of the fact that her body was still alive—a fortuitous accident that meant there was still hope for her return. I continued to come back, ceaselessly wishing and anticipating the day when her eyes would focus, or the twitch Barret had kindly made up for Marlene's benefit. I showed up even if I was alone, unaccompanied. When Barret was forced to work. When Marlene was in school. I became a regular, an expected occurrence, the everyday cheer whether I was sicker than normal or less enthusiastic than I needed to be.

But nothing ever changed. The nurses and keepers always steered her towards that same window, and wherever her gaze happened to rest was where it stayed. Her fingers remained limp and pallid, so small in my palm. Her eyes kept the dark rings, her joints sharp and jagged. I could always see the emaciated concavities in her collarbone, and the gaunt cheekbones that jutted from her colorless face.

I told her things. I relayed to her my day. On occasion I would describe and depict my ventures around the planet, visiting the towns where I knew no one and living on me and myself. I mentioned our friends as much as I was able, as much as I had seen them in the past year. I spoke of the gradually diminishing mako-borne monsters that were once so abundant. Things I knew she hadn't cared to give attention to after news of my death had spread. I imagined her smile when I told of Marlene's wish to see her, and I heard her mellifluous voice when I made references to past conversations, comments I had meant to question, subjects I had meant to investigate.

And as I had been dead to the rest of my only friends, I was again alive. Cid cursed me off for being so careless, chastised me for letting things getting so fucking out of control. Yuffie screamed in what was more of a high-pitched screech that I was jerk, and now that I was back it served me right Tifa's sick, after everything I've done to her. Red gave a smooth sigh of gratitude for my well-being, and prayed that my presence would do something to the situation we had all found ourselves in. Vincent said little, delivering his salutations and anticipation for my further recovery and Tifa's awakening. It wasn't so much painful as it was unbearable, the anxiety more grueling than the experience. And after the several weeks of sleeping on a couch and eating meals that needn't be paid for, I figured I had been through enough to be able to face any further obstacles that should arrive.

After three months, and the additional several weeks, Tifa remained hidden, a shell.

I grew tired, I became worn, and I was relentless.

* * *

Whoo. "…wasn't so much painful as it was unbearable" is the exact way I would describe writing this. But here it is. Like I said, it's a filler, used for reinforcing information, blah, blah. Hopefully the plot will start to kick up next chapter. For those of whom who are confused about it, yes Cloud is still sick. Mildly, but still feverish and dizzy and all that good stuff. You'll see why in the next chapter (scandal!). Oh, yeah, really sorry about the curse word in the second section. I would take it out, but it seemed right to me—so _Cid_. No offense to anyone. And major thanks to all the support I'm getting with this! I feel so loved! Raine


	7. Warning Sign

_Chapter VI :: Warning Sign_

Fresh from the pot, I stared down at the dark, steaming mug of molten dirt. It burned in my hands, yet it couldn't compare to the blaze in my flesh. The ceiling fan in the kitchen spun lazily above my head, weak protection against the blistering heat that was predicted to melt the city today. It did nothing to soothe the fire on my face. I closed my eyes, and carefully, deliberately, placed the mug on the counter.

"Hey. You awright?" Silence. "Cloud?"

"I'm fine." Why did it hurt to speak? The words rang in my head, and I regretted answering at all. I couldn't move, feet glued to the sticky wooden floorboards.

"Y'look like you're gonna pass out…" he commented. I heard him shuffle towards me, and sucked in breath as the coolness of his palm rested curtly on my forehead. He made a similar noise as he recoiled, scorched by the touch. "Je-esus! What the hell is _wrong_ with you?! Why the hell didn't you say somethin' 'bout you still bein' sick?!"

It wasn't as if I hadn't noticed. It wasn't as though I hadn't entirely forgotten about the illness that hadn't completely gone away. I just…I'd had a lot on my mind…

I tried to speak, but opening my mouth proved too difficult, my energy too spent from doing…other things. I gripped the edge of the counter and table, to keep my balance as the room begin to take off. I listened as Marlene hopped into the room, alarmed by the commotion. Barret quickly shooed her away, to call…someone, afraid of…of infection. He turned back to me, his hand reluctant on my shoulder.

"Hey, open yu'r eyes! Look at me!" I couldn't—I didn't.

The floor collapsed under my weight, and I fell with it.

--

_I fell for a long time. I wondered absently how deep the apartment was…if apartments could _be_ deep. After a while, it didn't really seem like falling, not as much as it resembled soaring, just hanging by now strings, simply being. Then everything stopped; my feet hadn't touched ground, but I knew that I was standing. I could see the world floating around me—a rainbow of chaos that was so jumbled and torn together it was peaceful, quiet. I could see _every_thing from where I was._

_ I stepped forward. So now I was here. I just needed to find out where "here" was. As I put one foot in front of the other, I found I could concentrate and _control _where my legs took me—I could _focus_ on the nothing I was standing on. The darkness didn't spin the way Barret's kitchen had, the way most things had for the past few days. I didn't see spots, and the blurs dancing in my field of view were _clear_ blurs, those that weren't meant to be completely lucid. My thoughts were organized, understandable, not tossed or burning. There were no voices, nothing that pierced my brain and made me wince._

_ My heart sank. I'd been here before—this void. The blackness was familiar._

No. No, not now…I was fine, really I was… _Then I realized that those last moments on the planet, I hadn't been able to walk._

_ I was dead._

_ "Long time no-see." I should have thrown myself off balance, with the speed at which I spun. But I stood, in the Lifestream, staring wide-eyed at a woman I hadn't seen in two years._

_ "A-Aeris?" She smiled gently, and nodded. "Wha…what are you doing here?" The smile faded._

_ "I should be asking _you_ that question," she replied, in a tone I had never heard her use. Her gaze rested on me, unwavering, solemn, remorseful—those brilliant green eyes that had always eluded of what lay behind, transfixed and mystified. She made me feel small, the way she was staring at me. "You've been stressing yourself too much, Cloud." It was a warning._

_ "But…Tifa is…_you_ know, don't you? You have to. If only you could see what's happened to her…" I couldn't find the words. She nodded, however, slowly. "I have to help her." She focused again, comforted and despondent._

_ "She's too far away. I can't even reach her, where she is…" She paused. "She can't hear you."_

_ I stared at her. Her figure swayed, illuminated, dulled._

_ "She doesn't want to hear you; she doesn't want to be found—she's convinced herself she enjoys being along forever." Silence. "Mostly."_

_ "I'm going to find her," I declared, the first open testimony of my self-assigned task. I didn't notice, then, how I spoke as if she had hidden herself in a building, an area, a place where I could go. "I don't care how far away she is—I'll bring her back." Aeris smiled, despite the fear._

_ "I think you're the only person who can. Just…don't push yourself too far." The grin went calm. "You've done it several times already, pushed yourself over the edge. But now, this time…I won't be able to help you if you die again." Something emitted from her lips that akin to a laugh, but it hardly was enough to label it that. "I'm not that strong. _You_—you need to be her support now, Cloud," she instructed. "You need to be stronger than me, or her. Stronger than you ever have been for anyone else. You're her last hope."_

_ I opened my mouth, speechless, closed it again._

_ "You…last time…?"_

_ "You're not giving yourself time to heal. You're still not healthy enough to go and start worrying over other people." Was I ever that healthy? "You can't go added more stress on yourself than you already have. You _know_ that." Her voice went quiet._

_ "But you know what she looks like—you know how she's become…! You said so yourself," I retorted, frustrated. "You said she can't here me, or Barret or anyone else! I have to find a way to bring her back, to _make_ her listen…she's _dead_ out there!"_

_ "I did say that," she agreed. "Yet simply talking to her isn't enough." She had suddenly become sharp, uncongenial. She sighed, her light hair freefalling down her back, framing her round face in the spectrum of colors. "She's almost gone. Cloud, listen to me: Tifa is…hurt. Not just hurt—that's not the right word. She's damaged. She's dying, slowly but surely she's slipping away, and soon no one will be able to help her. You have to make sure she knows you're alive." Her eyes narrowed, as she penetrated my mind with images. More memories. Memories that weren't mine, of families with fathers and afternoons with childhood friends._

_ —_Why, Mama? Why do you have to go…?

_ They were Tifa's. And I could see them. Nearly more coherent than my own, every one specific to its time and place._

_ "Everything she's been through—all those traumatic and painful experiences—they're all weighing on her. They finally took her down. Your leaving was the final disaster. She couldn't take it anymore." Aeris mellowed, softening. "She's lying to herself, convincing herself that she's happy where she is, away from everyone." She stared at me intently. "She doesn't want to feel anymore, so she's given it all up, so she can be numb."_

_ I closed my eyes. Because of me…_

_ —_ Come this spring…I'm leaving this town.__

_ "She won't want you to come after her. Even if you are alive, she won't admit it that she wants to live again," Aeris explained. "You were right. It's not that simple."_

_ —_ Sephiroth…Sephiroth did this to you, didn't he?!

_"Just tell me what to do," I said. "Anything, and I'll do it." I returned her gaze, determined, mindful._

_ —_Tifa…I don' know how to say this…that was someone from Coral. He—they found Cloud.

_"I'm afraid I can't tell you." For the first time in our conversation, she looked away. The emotions were all there, and yet she couldn't face me with the boldness that had come with readily-prepared answers. "I don't know. I don't know how far she is. All I know is that her soul…it's getting closer. I can feel her soul leaving her body bit by bit, but her mind…it's locked away." Her eyes rested on me once more. "You _are_ the only one who can reach her."_

_ "I know." Already, the image of her face was beginning to haze, distort. I called out to her, before I returned; she had become distant, yet I could still understand her words. "I…I'm sorry, Aeris." Quiet, save for the flowing around me._

_ "For not being there."_

_ "Yes."_

_ "You were, Cloud. Don't worry, I know you were there." She dissipated, and was gone. And as I reached out for her, to grasp at the shadow, I realized I was gone as well._

* * *

-sniffle- Augh. I can actually commiserate with Cloud on this one—being sick isn't fun at all. My, what good friends I have, getting me sick. Hmph. At least it isn't some weird jungle disease…hopefully. Anyway, there you have it. Hopefully most of the plot has been written; if not, please let me know. And don't worry: Tifa's recovery is going to be long and hard. I mean, she's a basket case, after all. Cloud's actually gonna hafta work for this one. O. And again, thanks for all those that reviewed! It makes me happy to know that people are really reading this. Raine


	8. Haine, Part I

_Chapter VII :: Haine, Part I_

"Hey! You're back!" The blonde receptionist smiled at me, beaming as I stepped off the elevator. "Thought somethin' had happed to ya'."

"Hey, Catherie." I smiled, despite myself—this hideous, dreary building had become much like a second home, as it had for Tifa, and although I hadn't missed it specifically, the stale, air-conditioned atmosphere was a welcome one after escaping the anger and distrust that had arisen in Barret's home after I had awoken ("You brought this on ye'self, stupid, actin' all strong—don't give me that look! Ain't _my_ fault you gotta be stupid…"). After three days of swimming in a bed of fever and unconsciousness, yelling was not something I wanted to deal with. "Yeah, well, I got sick for a bit." I exhaled, scratching my name on the 'Visitors' list. "But I'm all better now."

"Ah huh." She shot me skeptical look; in addition to being regular, I had also gotten to know most of the staff that worked here, including the receptionist, Catherie—as I had suspected, she was only twenty-five. And she _really_ did hate her job.

"Any change?" I asked, out of habit. I knew the answer—someone would have called if there had. But it was a necessary question, an aspect of human interaction that meant speaking the obvious and showing that I did care, even if everyone in the entire floor already knew.

Her face went sad. "No, nothing." She sighed, checked my signature—protocol. "Sometimes they show some signs of waking, y'know, false alarms. Kinda like good and bad days. But her…she never has any good days. It's strange…" She turned her eyes away, and blushed. "Sorry. It's just… I mean, it seems to me that simply visiting her isn't gonna do much. I dunno—I think maybe I've been workin' here too long."

"Yeah. I know." I glanced at the door, a thick block of steal to keep even the most insane from breaking out. Or breaking in. I wondered, not for the first time, what life was like, to consistently be trapped on the other side of that door; it made me almost wish Tifa _couldn't_ see or hear me, that she wasn't aware of her surroundings or her condition. Knowing the way she had been—free, energetic—such a reality would be enough to crush whatever remaining will to live she had left. "I don't know what to do anymore," I said helplessly. "I thought I did. I _thought_ I would be able to do _some_thing, but it never gets any better…" I rested my elbows in the linoleum desk.

"Hmm. I wish I could help ya', but I'm just a secretary, y'know?"

"Eh. It's alright. At this point I'll take whatever help I can get." Aeris hadn't been able to do much either.

_She's too far away. I can't even reach her where she is…_

"I wish you could see her, the way _I_ knew her…" I said absently.

"How long have you known her?"

"Practically my entire life. Most of it. I grew up with her." Her face lit up again, and she smiled.

"Really? That must be nice, knowing someone for that long—even if you're just kids, they'll still know you better than anyone else." She paused, and continued when I didn't say anything. "Kinda creepy—they might even know you better than you know your_self_. No matter what y'do, they'll know you inside and out… Did she know you that well?" I nodded slowly.

I stopped. I should have been also been able to say I had known Tifa just as well; I should have been able to know why this had happened—it had in fact been Aeris who had known and told me. And even now I didn't know what to do, because the Ancient had been rather vague. Why now did I assume I had the slightest clue what was going on?

I straightened. "You'd think that, wouldn't you?"

Catherie said nothing, the smile having faded some as she proceeded to zone into her thoughts. There was a familiar _click_ as the security lock on the door released, then the brief rush of sterile air as I pushed open the heavy door and crossed the barrier between hell and sanctuary.

She had moved, gone from her usual place by the window. At first I panicked, searching through the pack of unmoving, unblinking bodies around me, yet none were—though they eerily resembled—my best friend. I went on panicking until an elderly orderly, another of the full-time nurses who recognized my face, directed me down a long marble corridor and into another wing of the hospital. Tifa's dorm.

"She's been sleeping for the past few days," the old woman whispered to me, then darted off like a grey, congenial rat.

Tifa's eyes were closed. Her arms crossed neatly over her stomach, she was a sad excuse for any living creature I'd seen—if possible, her skin had lost the rest of whatever pigment it had managed to maintain. I swallowed, and let the door close behind me. I didn't want to admit that this felt just as it had the first time Barret had brought me to this place, a dreadful, sinking of the heart and a slow evaporation of hope.

_She's dying, slowly but surely she's slipped away…_

I watched her chest, intently frozen with each moment of stillness after she exhaled, and given new life as she inhaled again.

_…and soon no one will be able to help her._

Because of her lack of ability to eat, now that she had made that final leap into unconsciousness, a drip had been set up in my absence, attached to her wrist to keep whatever blood still flowed in her veins warm. And in my opinion it wasn't accomplishing very much—she certainly felt like a corpse. I bowed my head, chilled by the touch of her flesh; the fever had almost gone completely, and now the last traces skittered away, swept and blown by her deadness. I wanted to cry—this was my childhood friend before me, ashen and inert. The first person to have ever showed me unconditional loyalty. The only one to have stolen my heart. I tried not to think, pained by the memories, hers and mine. Frightened by the future. The future that was so unpredictable, so fickle—it could go either way now. I could fail, and she would die; or she could awaken—I would bring her back and teach her to live again.

I squeezed her hand, trying in vain to warm it. _Please, Tifa, hear me. Come back!_ I was afraid—among other things—of breaking her hand, so seemingly small and fragile as I clenched it. Why was this happening—why was I so helpless?

_Tifa…!_

Silence. I felt my brain push forward, searching for something, reaching to where I couldn't see. For a curt moment, I couldn't breathe, lost and alone. The light hurt my eyes, so I couldn't open them and see where my mind had brought me.

"What are you doing here?" I froze. I knew that voice, thought I'd never hear it again…feminine, soft and smooth, like Aeris'…

My eyes shot open, my head came up.

"Tifa?!" Her eyes narrowed; she stood before me, hands on her hips.

"How did you get here?" I smiled, the grin spreading from ear to ear as I saw her face, pink with flush, her eyes alight. Her hair, released from its usual tie, flowed graceful down her back, bouncing and floating just slightly as she moved. She was alive—Tifa was alive!

* * *

I am so, _so_ sorry for the wait! Please let me explain before you kill me—my original intention was to publish this chapter _before_ I went on vacation two weeks ago, just after school ended. Unfortunately, things didn't go quite as I planned…at all, really, and the chapter wasn't even written at the point. I am really sorry! And now, here I am, giving you _this_. I'm really disappointed with the way this turned out. I thought I'd had everything planned out, y'know, story-wise and all, but I changed my mind at the last minute realizing that it wasn't going to work. The next chapter is already written and will be published within the week, I just need to organize it. Please, if you have any suggestions for me, don't hesitate to say so; I have a new idea, but I would really like feedback on whether or not it'll work—you've all been so wonderful giving me advice and encouragement! Once again, I'm _so_ sorry for making you all wait! Raine


	9. Haine, Part II

_Chapter VIII :: Haine, Part II_

I stepped forward, towards her glaring figure. My hip collided with something sharp and solid, and I glanced down, staring at where should have been a white, marble-tile floor and instead stood a dark, beaten piano. Sheet music cascaded to the floor, as I stared around me. We weren't in the hospital anymore—we weren't even in Junon. My feet thumped on wooden panel flooring, and the sound resonated throughout the small house. Tifa, startled, backed away from me, bumping herself into the window seat in her bedroom.

"What are you doing here?" she asked again, in a tone that suggested she was more than slightly annoyed with my presence. I grinned, picked up the fallen paper.

"I should be asking you the same question, Tif. I've been looking all over for you…" Searching desperately for the conscience she had hidden away from everyone. I took another step, and she backed away, her eyes darker than before. "Tifa, what's wrong…?"

Her chest heaved, as if she were having trouble breathing. "Go away."

"But it's me! Cloud. You have to—"

"I _know_ who you are. I'm not _stupid_," she retorted. "I don't _care _who you are. What are you doing here? I don't want you here. Go away." The words came out hot and broken; I couldn't believe what I was hearing—there had to be some mistake…

"Go away? But…"

"Don't you listen? I don't want you here! You're not supposed to be here—no one is." She paused. "I'm not going with you! Leave me alone!" I had never thought it possible to be this confused. I knew better than to attempt to shorten the gap between us, distressed as she so clearly already was, so I stayed. My pelvis had begun to throb slightly.

I glanced up, to the mahogany beams in the ceiling. The sun was beginning to set outside, and the room was drowned in purple, humid colors. The side of her face burned orange, making her eyes glow from the depleting sunlight.

"I don't want you here," she hissed between her teeth. "I came here so I would be _alone_! Surely _you_ of all people should know the meaning of _that_ word."

"What?!" I stared at her incredulously. "What in the world are you talking about? Why would I…?"

"Leaving all the time, leaving me, leaving _every_one. You're so selfish, you wouldn't understand how any one else feels even if you _tried_. I told you I didn't want you to be here and I meant it! I'm supposed to be _alone_ now." She laughed somewhat, but without humor. "The one time I _want_ solitude you decide to come looking for me. How ironic." My brow furrowed; something was very wrong with this picture, with Tifa herself—never had I heard her talk to _any_one this way, much less me. All her characteristic amiable features were gone—all I could see was anger, an emotion unnervingly close to hatred. "So go. I'm giving you my blessing to leave me alone. I don't want to see you anymore. I want to forget about you; I thought I was doing a rather good job, too, until you showed up." She straightened, her lips pursed together in a defiant white line.

"You _heard_ me," she said, her voice rising. "Get out!"

"Tifa, please, listen to what I have to say…" I thought I had some idea of what was going on, if I wasn't pretending at this point.

"Get. Out." She stood, her entire body pulsating with rebelliousness, before me, every muscle tense with what now I was certain was hatred.

"Tifa, please, you have to listen to me. You have to wake up—if only you could see yourself…"

"_Go away!_ _Leave me ALONE!_" It was more of a shriek than anything else, and I forced myself to keep my hands at my sides, not to cover my ears; even with all my years of knowing this woman, I never knew she could scream so loudly. "I can't _take _it anymore!—You never understood. You still don't," she spat, "that all I want is to be left. _Alone_. _Away_ from _every_thing. Away from _you_! I can't stand being around you!" Her words stung, so much as to threaten my will. These were the lies, the little lies she had whispered to herself in the night, the consolation she had used as a replacement for me.

Trying my best—it wasn't good enough; I couldn't give up. For her. For me.

"_Listen_ to me! Please, just give me second to explain—" For a moment I expected her to leap at my throat, as she stood and fumed. But she remained still, gaze unwavering in the receding light.

"What's _wrong_ with you?!" she shouted. "God, I don't know what I saw in you! You're too stupid—you don't _get_ it! I came here because I _wanted_ to! I _want_ to be alone, I don't _want_ to have to listen to your _excu_ses anymore! All you've ever done is hurt me! Every single goddamn time you never fail to make me feel like complete _shit_!" Her eyes narrowed into slits, focusing the venom. "And now you managed to follow me here—_my_ sanctuary, and expect me to go with you, back so you can hurt me even more."

I glanced around once more. "To Nibelheim?" How had I gotten here? How had _she_ gotten here?

"_Yes_, Cloud, to Nibelheim. _My_ Nibelheim, my home. Now _get out!_"

I wanted to scream at her, as she was to me, but I knew that it wouldn't do any good. The rage that seethed and tumbled in those fiery irises frightened me, and as I looked at her, I realized with a sudden jolt that this wasn't Tifa. Not completely—it couldn't possibly be. It was only a part, a segment, a strand of the fabric of the emotions that had swept her under the waves, and had locked her in this undercurrent without any chance of resurfacing, of breathing again.

"Tifa…"

"_Get out_." Her knuckles were pressed white, and blood had begun to seep through her fingers from clenching her fists hard as she was. "Get _out_! Go back to your flower girl and forget about me! So I can finally try and _heal_!"

I stopped. "Flower girl…?" She sneered.

"_Yes_, Cloud. _Your_ flower girl. Or did you forget her too—maybe you're just so oblivious you didn't even notice _her_ existence either. Maybe you're just too _stupid_ to realize that she's dead!" I didn't know what to do, I was so angry; so confused.

"What?!"

"You heard me. She's dead and there's nothing you can do about it—oh, you _could_ have. You could have stopped her from being _murdered_, but you just stood there and did _nothing_!" At the moment, I couldn't breathe. "Maybe you didn't care about her, _I_ don't know. _No_ one knows what you're thinking, ever, if you _are_ thinking." She seemed proud of herself for making this observation. "And before you go making stupid, rash decisions let me tell you that you can't do anything now. Coming here was useless because you can't change anything. I _like_ being here, because I don't have to deal with people like _you_."

_She's lying to herself, convincing herself she's happy where she is, away from everyone._

She was putting up an awfully good fight, though. It was very near like trying to reason with a cement wall, not a crack or missing shard to mar her livid resilience. I wondered, among several other things, if at all there would be a break, an opportunity to show her what lies these were, the malice that flew from her mouth; Tifa was shooting me hostile looks not even Sephiroth had gotten the privilege of receiving.

"I should _kill_ you—the world would be _so_ much better off." She bared her teeth, like a rabid animal about to pounce. "I should rip your heart out and make you _eat_ it, shove it down your lying gullet and make you suffer for all those times you treated me as if I was _nothing_. I'm _not NOTHING_, _Cloud_!" I winced as she screeched again. "You can't treat me as if I'm a piece of _garbage_ you can just throw away whenever you _feel_ like it! I'm _not_! Youcan't _treat_ me like that!" I hadn't realized she felt that way, I hadn't…

"Tifa…" I fished for the inspiration; even if it was a dream. "I'm sorry if I made you feel that way—I hadn't realized…" She ceased to move, waiting for that exact moment. I swallowed. "I wouldn't want anything to happen to you," I started again. "You're my best friend, the one who's always been there for me. Aeris is dead." I knew it. "But _you_'re not, you're still alive. You just have to wake up, just wake up and see that I'm there with you…"

She inhaled sharply. Then it died: the resentment, the hatred and spite that had driven her to threaten my life, disappeared as quickly as I had seen it grow and control her. Her expression softened—the light, rapidly dimming, cast hard shadows across her eyes, masking them from me. She stepped back, further from the sunlight.

"That's it then." It wasn't a question.

She recoiled further, escaping entirely the small plane of light spread across the wooden floor and becoming swallowed in shadow. Like an ember losing the heat that had kept it alive, she dwindled and wavered, leaving her open, unprotected. She shivered, just slightly, as though cold. I held my hand out to her, knowing better than to physically move closer, knowing her response. "Just come with me," I said. "Wake up and see." She shook her head, folding in on herself.

"No. I don't want to go." She sounded small, meek, like a child afraid of peaking from the security of under the bedclothes, afraid of what she might see.

I was surprised at how drastic and quick the change was. Where once she had been poised to murder, now she acted as if I had stabbed her. Whatever I said, it had struck a cord somewhere. It had broken through and found her.

"C'mon, Tif. It's okay. Just open your eyes…"

She closed her eyes and shuddered. "Don't try, please. It's too late."

She had backed herself into a corner, hidden until all I could make out was the outline of her pallid face, the darkness of her lips and the emptiness of her eyes; I could see the contrast between her free-falling hair and the wall behind her, black against the whitewash. She hugged herself, and her mouth formed words I was too far away to hear. She was trapped, there was nowhere for her to run, nowhere she could go. I could confront her now, take her and hold her, show her that I was real. I attempted a step towards her, only to find that I couldn't move—someone's hand was on my shoulder. I shifted, tried to jerk it off, but whosever hand it was had an iron grip, and I remained where I was, so far away from her. I called at her to come to me, only to find that the more I said, the more she cowered; the more I struggled, the tighter my oppressor's grip became.

I awoke with her words ringing raucously in my head, "…It's too late."

The nurse stared down at me with large, blue eyes—so light they were almost grey. Sensing my waking, she brought her hand back, and stood staring at me as I collected myself, trying to make sense of what had happened. Tifa lay where she had when I'd left her, utterly unconscious. Had it been a dream…?

"Visiting hours are almost over. You should go home, get some sleep there," she said. Her crinkled face stared morosely at me, then briefly settled on the bed's occupant. Tifa hadn't stirred. "Y'shouldn't be sleeping here."

I stepped out into the street, slightly dazed and thoroughly confused. It had to have been a dream, as disturbing and unsettling as it was—Tifa never would have yelled like that to _any_one, had she been awake. Dreaming was the only things that made sense…

_…her mind, it's locked away. You _are_ the only one who can reach her…_

I thought.

Past the towering buildings and the spread of asphalt, across the ocean, the sky flamed in the dying heat of sunset.

* * *

And the lesson of today's story, children, is that when Tifa gets pissed, she gets _pissed_. I surprised myself when I reread this. Heh. I have to agree with relena55 in that it is somewhat satisfactory to see Cloud suffer, if just a little. Anyway, here's the next chapter, as promised. I hope it won't be too hard for me to concentrate from now on, as it has been lately, even though I have to live with the next few months knowing that I practically have a reserved copy of Advent Children waiting for me when it comes out (it's good to have connections). Thank you so much for your support! It keeps me going. Raine


	10. Interlude for Information

_Chapter IX :: Interlude for Information_

"I don't know how it happened! All I remember is sitting next to her, in the hospital, and then all of a sudden we were in her room, in Nibelheim—and Tifa was awake! She was talking to me. But…it couldn't have been her…she kept screaming and going on about how much she hated me, things that like that…" Such as threatening to kill me, for example, but I thought better of saying that out loud. I drifted off, thinking to myself, recollecting exactly what I had witnessed.

Barret stared at me, his face blank. He remained silent during and for a while after I described my enigmatic palaver with Tifa, or her conscience, whatever it had been.

On occasion I would catch a small red blur dart out of view through the corner of my vision.

"And?" He sounded skeptical.

"And? And I saw her! Tifa, she was angry for some reason. The moment she saw me she started yelling. And she _said_ everything Aer—" I shut my mouth; he didn't know the things Aeris had elucidated for me during my short trip to Limbo, didn't know I'd seen her at all—and unless I wanted to be locked away with Tifa, I couldn't explain it to him.

He sighed. "Are you still sick? Do I need t'find a doctor for you too?"

"But Tifa…"

"Tifa nothin'! Why are y'making stuff up? You think I need y'tellin' me lies like this? Y'think I don't have enough on my mind already?" My heart sank: he didn't believe me…Why? Had I actually expected him to? "Cloud, listen, it was a dream, nothin' else…are you sure the mako or Jenova ain't manipulatin' you again or nothin'?"

I glared at him.

He averted his eyes from me, towards the floor. "Look, I been thinkin', y'know, about that proposal some of 'er doctors suggested." I felt my heart stop. "'Bout jes not doin' anything, y'know, if she were t'jes suddenly stop breathin'." A muffled squeal came from the hallway, though if Barret heard his daughter's sound of disapproval he hid the signs perfectly; I tried to remain calm, staring at him, difficult as it was to do so, and stayed put, my hands clenching and unclenching themselves in my lap.

"Wha…and you're calling _me_ crazy?! When you're actually considering _killing_ her?!" His head came up from being immersed in the floorboards, eyes old and resigned.

"This is hurtin' us all," he said softly. "There're cases where people stay that way forever, until they die of old age! I don' want Marlene growin' up with that. An'…an'," he struggled with the words, "wi' her schoolin' startin' up again this fall…I won't be able to afford it very soon." I could feel my face growing hot with anger.

"You're going to kill Tifa," I stated, words slow, "because you can't afford it?!" He opened his mouth to protest, but I couldn't let him speak; thinking made it hard to breathe. "Have you forgotten everything we went through, everything _she_'s been through?! You're just going to ignore all of that because you don't want to find the money to pay a few doctors?" I knew instinctively my argument was a weak one—even _I_ knew doctors didn't run cheap. But that wasn't the point. I couldn't very well explain to him my sudden haphazard idea on what had happened to the woman; how could I convince him that the encounter I'd had with her was what I had begun to believe it was—more than simply a dream I refused to forget? "You could bring her here, if that's it."

"Yer not listenin' to me," he countered. "I don' want Marlene growin' up with this…"

"In my opinion, I don't think she'd ever forgive you if you did go through with it," with a sideways glance at her shadow in the hallway. Even if he attempted to deny _that_, he knew deep down as well as I did it was true. "If money's the problem, _I_'ll pay for it then. I've got enough, and when I run out, I'll get a job." I relaxed slightly, when the rebuttals ceased. "You don't want this anymore than I do," I said gently. "Just…hang in there for a while longer. I think…I think I might have this figured out." I didn't, really, not yet—pretending seemed appropriate, however; I was confident I would have it.

Barret shot me a disbelieving stare, but my words seemed enough to convince him, at least for now. I wasn't worried he would pick up the suggestion again too soon—somehow, I knew the main, if not the only, reason he'd brought it to my attention in the first place was because he _want_ed my condemnation, to put him back on track and keep him from wandering too far into doubt. Yet even so, I had to admit the truth of his words: it _was_ difficult.

He rubbed his forehead with his fingers. "I don' think _I_ can handle much more o' this…" I nodded, silently; the shine of the glass suddenly took my interest and held.

"Don't worry. It won't be long now."

--

It wasn't until that evening did I notice the dark, misshapen stain on the ceiling of the parlor, looming haphazardly over my head while I slept—or lay trying to sleep. The summer night hummed with the buzzing of streetlamps and faint late-night television programs in the apartments above and below ours. Occasionally the motor of an automobile would pass down the street, then fade into the black. Minute beads of sweat had sprouted along my brow, and I made an effort to remain still in an attempt to create as little body heat as possible. July was nearly at its end; I'd been living with Barret and Marlene for just over a month, though it could have been only a few days or as much as several years and it would not have made a difference—Tifa was still in the hospital, and not one of us were ready to accept that the situation was hopeless.

_I don't want you here. Go away._

I lay atop the thin sheets, staring at the spot and thinking of Tifa.

I wasn't confused. I merely couldn't find any reasonable rationalization on what had happened—aside from accepting the fact that it was a dream and nothing more, which it hadn't been. Nothing made sense as I saw it now, and that realization came in perfect clarity, not in the incoherent mass of uncertainty. I _knew_ it hadn't been a dream, simply knew from the denial that had lodged itself in my chest, near my heart, that what I had seen—and heard—had in fact been real, or something very close to being real. Of course, I'd stopped trying to explain this to Barret—how could I convince him of this sureness when all I had to go by was gut instinct?

And I could also see how much strain all this was having on myself and my friends; I acknowledged Barret's plea for relief. The only one who seemed to hold a constant faith was Marlene, with a child's untiring sense of trust.

My mind fluttered from one idea to the next without settling, in the organized ignorance of what small bits I knew. _At least she knows I'm alive…_

_ …are you sure the mako or Jenova ain't manipulatin' you again or nothin'?_

Thus began the process. My train of thought brought me back to when I _had_ been controlled by the belligerent alien; where my sanity was forgotten, when killing Aeris and helping Sephiroth had seemed like the right thing to do. I shuddered involuntarily, repressing the guilt. I had threatened Aeris' life at least twice, and both times Tifa had been there to stop me from leaping over the edge. I stopped myself from imagining a life without her, whether she was alive or not. Jenova's domination on my conscience had made such feelings insignificant—trust, friendship, love—but now I was free to experience them. All that I had been able to reach were hate and the hunger for power, the sadistic infatuation with causing pain. No: what had happened today was not from the influence of any creature other than myself.

Then what was it?

I closed my eyes, unable to prevent the course that I was failing, failing Tifa and Barret and the rest of Avalanche and myself. I couldn't stand the idea, that here I was, lying helpless and doing nothing but reflecting. After all, _Tifa_ had done this before—saved my own conscience from the false memories and overwhelming urge to simply give up. _She_ went inside, pushing her own life aside to set mine straight. Why couldn't I do that for her now?

_…are you sure the mako or Jenova ain't manipulatin' you again or nothin'?_

I blinked, tracing the oblong shape above my head with my eyes and seeing the mako surrounding me, catching the piano and the walls in her bedroom quiver and solidify in the corners of my vision.

I sat up. That was it.

That was it. I _was_ doing what Tifa had two years ago. What I had met was Tifa's conscience, her emotions and beliefs as opposed to the memories she's used to piece me back together; only instead of falling into the Lifestream…

I swung my legs onto the floor, the prospects burning holes in my sight. It made sense, didn't it—meeting bits and pieces, one attitude at a time instead of being overpowered by the entire picture? The rest of puzzle began to fit into place. It hadn't been a dream—everything had been very, very real.

Good thing I hadn't snapped back at her.

In a moment I found myself in the kitchen, immediately heading down the hall. I stopped outside Tifa's room, catching my breath and quieting my heartbeat. Barret snored no more than a few feet in front of me, and yet I stayed where I was, trembling with excitement. The round clock over the sink had read one thirty-two in the morning. Should I wake him to describe my new sudden revelation?

I chose life.

Regardless of the darkness, I refused to switch any light on in Tifa's abandoned bedroom. I instead found myself at her dresser, fumbling with the litter adorning it. Among the many vials of mysteriously-scented perfume and random slips of paper, my eyes caught the only light penetrating the darkness, the tiny red bulb of her PHS shedding away some of the disorientation. Naturally, I didn't need to see the buttons, familiar as I was with the design. And only until someone answered did I realize whose number I'd dialed.

"Cloud? Is that you? What's wrong? What's happened?" His voice fuzzed for a second as I sat myself down on the bed.

"Nothing's wrong, Red. I need your help with something," I said quietly, fearing the consequences if the man next door awoke. "I think I may have figured this out."

"What time is it over there? Shouldn't you be sleeping?" I'd forgotten about the time difference; I stretched, stifling a yawn as I forced myself to concentrate my original reason for calling—with no clock in the room, I could only guess.

"Almost two. But listen, I think I know how to help Tifa!"

He jumped at the statement. "Really? Is she alright? Has she shown signs of waking up?"

"No, but listen, I _saw_ her—I talked to her! I think I know how to wake her!" And with that I began to describe to Red my adventure, the fury and hatred that had possessed her, the abrupt change in her demeanor after several minutes of attempting to break through; I elucidated for him my theory: it wasn't a dream—somehow, I had found Tifa's conscience through the mako in my blood. He listened attentively, taken in thought until at last I finished, breaking to notice any waking sounds from the other rooms of the apartment.

"It could…" He paused, and I inquired more information, furthering my claim.

"I don't remember much, when me and Tifa fell into the Lifestream," I told him in a hushed voice. "She asked a lot of questions, make me answer every one of them. And then, all of a sudden, I understood, like a tunnel was opened or something. I knew which memories were mine and which weren't. But the specifics—what she said, what questions she asked exactly—I don't know." My heart skipped a beat. "I never thanked her for it, either."

"It makes sense. I can see where your idea could work, Cloud. It's strange, yes, but perfectly possible." Another pause. "I can't tell you exactly what happened—only Tifa herself can do that. All the rest of us knew was that you two had fallen into the Lifestream after the attack on Mideel, and then you washed up on shore, conscious…for the most part. For the record you know more than any of us do." I heard him chuckle slightly on the other end of the line. "Why don't you ask her, the next time you talk to her?"

"See, Red? That's just the thing—I don't know _what_ I did! I don't know how I can go back and talk to her—I don't know how I entered the Lifestream from the hospital in Junon in the first place…"

"Maybe you didn't enter the Lifestream at all," he suggested quietly. "Maybe the Lifestream is only a medium through which you can go into other people's conscience?" I could tell from the hushed excitement in his voice that he was suffering the same thoughtful inspiration I was. And, like the visions, questions arose and swelled in waves, once again threatening to subdue me back into naivety.

"Then…where did the Lifestream come from?"

Silence. For a brief, tensed second I thought I heard groaning coming from the room next door.

This was it. "In your years with the Shinra, or, rather, after the destruction of Nibelheim, you were imprisoned along with your comrade and…experimented on, yes?" I nodded into the darkness, at the same time giving him a small sound of affirmation for him to continue. "Perhaps…the mako in your blood transpired into…_some_thing—a palpable will, let's say. The Lifestream is composed mostly of mako, along with the spirits of those passed and what else. Your mako could have substituted for the lacking of the Lifestream where you were. There were most likely other aspects involved, naturally, but that would have to be the majority of it. It would let you reach her, for the first thing. I'm sure it was the rest of your conscience from there…" My heart was thundering in my chest so loudly, if nothing else had woken Barret, I feared the sound of it would. I found I couldn't stop thanking Red—of course it was just a theory; no one would ever have been able to be certain as to what had really happened. But still…it was better than having nothing at all. It was undoubtedly better than being completely ignorant. I smiled to the darkness. "So," Red spoke up again, "I suppose you'll just have to go back to her and imitate what you did before. As for her anger…I'm not so sure I can give you an answer on that one. My guess was that it was the immediate emotion you triggered when she saw you. Or it was the one emotion that had been oppressed the most." Probably both.

"Thank you _so_ much, Red. I'm going to go see her first thing tomorrow." I could feel his grin pressing against my ear.

"Glad I could be of service. But Cloud, I'm sure you should be getting some sleep before you try anything tomorrow. It might not work if you're not completely focused." I agreed, though _I_ wasn't too sure I'd been able to fall asleep at all tonight. "Make sure you call me if there's any change—I want to be the first one to know."

"All right. Good night, Red." He laughed.

"Good afternoon to you too, Cloud." We both hung up—how he managed to accomplish this I couldn't say—and I fell back on the bed, once again sinking into its plush softness. Unlike the parlor, her ceiling was a spotless white, grayed from the darkness. I wondered absently whether or not she would care that I was about to have slept in her bed twice during her absence. Reality told me she _couldn't_ have cared, yet my dream was that she eventually would.

* * *

This is the chapter I've been dreading—and now it's finished! What a relief. I wanted to post it before I went off to Otakon to blow my money on FF7 paraphernalia. And so here's the explanation. As I said in previous A/Ns (or at least I hope I did), I'll leave it as a theory in the story for now, or maybe for the rest of the story—how can you prove something like that without going into another long banter? But I would really love some of your feedback on why or why not this could work. It's really appreciated! I think I somehow wrote this so that it made _some_ kind of sense (at least to _me_, anyway), but it wouldn't surprise me if I left some gaps along the way. Otherwise, if this all works out, it's smooth sailing from here! Thank you! Raine


	11. Éviter

_Chapter X :: Éviter_

After many attempts, I finally got it, roughly an hour since entering Tifa's dormitory and nearly twelve hours after realizing I hadn't even dreams of hoping to fall asleep again, after my conversation with Red at two in the morning, my voice effectively masked by Barret's snoring; the actual process—reducing myself to an inert, meditative state and staying that way—took around several short minutes, after I'd gotten the hang of everything. It was hard to say how long the real transition lasted—it could have ranged anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, in my opinion. But when I did manage it, at last, I _knew_ it.

I brought my head up, letting my conscience clear slightly before focusing on my surroundings. I blinked as the hospital ceiling fell away, and the sky bloomed and expanded above me; the sun reflected off the mountain faces, casting twin rays on the town and sending any possibly penetrating shadows fleeting. Damn it was hot; it was a crisp, dry heat as opposed to the suffocating humidity of Junon's concrete-infested streets. Nibelheim stretched off before me, rising partly up the mountain slopes and falling back around either side, dissipating to make way for the towering hills, snow-capped despite the temperature. I remained poised just on the edge of my hometown, able to overlook many of the buildings from my vantage point without much movement; I could even catch glimpses of the Shinra Mansion's impressive acreage by squinting and focusing completely past the cream-plastered houses and cobbled streets. I grasped as much as I could, forgetting the memories that swarmed there and fully appreciating its vintage beauty—only once had I taken the time to take in the whole town in its entirety, and even then it never ceased to surprise me how large such a small town could seem, depending on where you were standing. As it was, I stood on the path entering the main square, picketed fences reaching barely to my knees entrapping me on both sides, until I saw, further down to the side, a break in the border. I saw then, from where I watched, my destination.

"You're back." She spoke first, yet didn't turn as I came up behind her, somehow sensing my presence before the sound of my footsteps could be heard. I hadn't a chance to respond before she said, "I didn't think I'd see you again." She sounded as if she herself didn't believe the words.

The cemetery was a small one, overgrown as it was with weeds and unornamented brush—not many in the town knew it existed; after Sephiroth's attack seven years prior, most of the citizens who had been aware of it had either died or escaped to as far as possible. Their replacement townspeople wouldn't have cared for it even if they had known. It was a well-kept secret. There were few tombstones, covered with soft forest moss and scattered plants. They broke away with the fuzzy mold and crumbled in chunks, their inscriptions faded to the point of almost utter illegibility. She stood before one, a smoothed marble slab—relatively recent in comparison to its ancient counterparts—gradually sinking lower into the sandy dirt under our boots. The faint 'Lockhart' was just nearly invisible beneath the greenery, along with the additive message below it: 'Beloved Wife, Mother, and Friend'; had I not visited the place before, while the carvings were still fresh and new, I would not have been able to read them.

And even after all these years, it made me uncomfortable to stand there, looking down at the names of those I couldn't find the heart to mourn; it was a strange sensation, standing amidst the deceased of my hometown, of those who had lived before and after I had been born, knowing there were missing bodies, places where certain people should have been and weren't.

It was unsettling, to say the least, searching for my own mother's marker and finding none.

"Do you miss her?" Tifa's voice carried me away from my thoughts, reading my mind with uncanny ability. I glanced at her. How long was she planning on staying in that spot without moving?

"Of course I do."

"I think about them everyday." She grinned slightly, following my train of thought. "I try to picture Papa's grave, next to my mother's. I wish I knew where they put him." Her tone worried me—it wasn't a though she were hiding something behind the calm; it sounded as if there wasn't anything there at all to hide. "It's kind of scary, if you think about it," she said, "that if you hadn't been there, if…just a bit higher…" she motioned towards her collarbone, her neck, "I wouldn't be here either. My body would be missing, like his." How could I reply to something like that? I would have opted, instead of words, to hug her, but kept my arms at my sides as I drew up beside her.

"Why are you here, Tifa?" I asked, after a moment.

"…I'm sorry about those things I said"—or shouted, or screamed—"I didn't mean them. Not really." She hung her head, in preparation for any amount of consequence I would be about to deliver. I bit my lip, hiding my frustration.

"'Not really'?" My laugh came out dry and fearful. "Eh. It's okay. You were just angry. People do stupid things when they're angry."

She shot me a sideways glance, then shook her head. "It doesn't matter how angry I was, I shouldn't have said what I did." Her voice went quiet, suddenly. "I've been doing that a lot lately, screwing up like that. It's been worrying me. It's never happened before, not that severely. I mean, once or twice, but I could always handle it after that. This—that…it was different." My brow creased under the sun.

"Doing what, Tif?"

"Oh, you know, lashing out at people just because they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. I said those terrible things and blamed you for my problems just because you _happen_ed to be there at that one instant." She shrugged lightly. "I guess I must be PMSing or something."

I want to slap myself—_why_ couldn't I just meet the _real_ Tifa already?

"It never occurred to you I might have deserved it?" I asked. "That maybe some of those things you said just might have been true?" She glanced at me with wide eyes, honestly horrified at the prospect of truth.

"Of course not! I was angry—you said so yourself! I didn't mean any of it…"

"That wasn't the question, whether you meant it or not," I replied a bit testily. "What you said was true, about my leaving and everything; you just brought it out in the open." She turned away from me, actually flustered; her hands fidgeted nervously with stray locks of hair that fell over her shoulders, knuckles like porcelain beads under the heavy sun.

"I didn't mean—"

"No, you didn't!" I shouldn't have yelled at her—I didn't want to—knowing that it couldn't possible have done much good for either of us, in any case, but how much more of this could I take, the aversion to anything that might mean an instability in her strength, when even that was bravado? How much could she lie to me this way?

_You need to be stronger than me, or her. Stronger than you ever have been for anyone else…_

"I know you didn't, that's not the point! Tifa, why are you doing this? I just want to know—why are you hiding from everyone? Why'd you come here?" She gazed at me, then let her eyes drop to the ground as my aggravation registered. The question settled itself, and the time she spent over it was used not to find the answer, but exactly how to word it. She forced a smile, a startlingly resemblance to something genuine; only her eyes deceived the production that she was content with this circumstance. I cringed inside. If I didn't know any better…

Her bare shoulders lifted, then fell. "I just needed to get away for a little bit. Everything was getting so chaotic, what with you gone and everyone being…well, I figured I needed a break for a while. That's all." I closed my eyes, turning from her; she didn't understand—"taking a break" and suffering an emotional collapse—a stroke—were not the same thing.

"And how long were you planning on staying here?"

The corner of her mouth twitched upwards, playfully. "Not for very long, naturally. I can't just _leave_ Barret and Marlene alone for too long, after all. I'm going to go back soon, really." I wondered if she realize I knew she was lying. "I mean, I have to."

I struggled for several minutes for the words, my searches coming up short considerably. "This isn't fair. It isn't fair for me, or Barret—Marlene most of all. We're all worried about you," I mumbled finally. "Everyone else…they don't know you're here. They think you're dead…" Her beautiful eyes came up from the dirt, staring at me in puzzlement. Her mother's headstone blinked cheerfully with sunlight, and I was forced to squint in order to catch the movement as she brushed the strands from in front of her face, giving a little shrug as she did so.

"They learn to live on. That's what life is about, moving past loss and death and stuff like that." And I found myself wondering whether every word that came from her mouth was a lie; I was beginning to consider fighting her anger again—at least that particular personification had shown real emotion, real anguish and real contempt for the pain she had endured on my account. Those hadn't been such blatant mendacities but mere misconceptions, answers she had provided herself when no one else had been able—if only I had known what was going on at the time, as I did now, it would have been easier for me. This, on the other hand… "That's what I learned I had to do, a long time ago, to move on. After Mama and Papa died, and then you…I had no one. What else _is_ there? I'd be stuck in a hole for the rest of my life, mulling over things I can't change."

"Their deaths don't bother you?" I asked, perturbed.

"Well, not as much as they _used_ to, for sure. I still think about it, of course, but like I said, wishing to change the past isn't going to do anything. It won't bring them back to life. And I didn't have much of a choice in that matter, did I? So I try not to worry about it too much." She paused. "I don't blame you for leaving, Cloud. I can't really, 'cause here I am, doing the same thing. 'Clearing my mind,' right? Like you." That stung; it would have been wonderful to believe her, to remain quiet and a good friend and not dig into her real face, but the guilt that came with the comment was so strong I doubted I couldn't do much else but see it for what it was: a completely viable accusation.

"I'm sorry." It seemed appropriate, even if she refused to understand what I meant.

"I told you not to worry about it. It's in the past, behind us." She stared forward, strategically laying a silence between us before continuing. "I'm just wondering…why you're here. I can't imagine why you bothered coming all this way just to talk to me…"

I stopped.

"Why I _bothered_?" I began to fumble again, tripping and stumbling over an answer that should have been so blatant it couldn't possibly be expressed in words—shouldn't have _need_ed to be. I found the volume of my voice beginning to rise. "Why I bothered?! Be-because…because I _can't_ just sit around and let you waste away! God, it's _visible_ to anyone who _looks_ at you!" I retorted, thinking of Marlene. "You're dying, Tifa—did you think I was just _let_ you _die_, just _watch_ my best friend disappear right in front of my face?" The woman beside me said nothing, and I relaxed slightly as the adrenaline sifted from my blood. "Why are you here, Tifa? You never answered my question, not once."

She opened her mouth to reply, gaping like a fish until she found exactly the sufficient words to avoid my query. "Die? I'm not dying, Cloud—I'm happier here than I have been in a long time. It's _nice_ here. Ever since Aeris…" The rest of the sentence decayed in her throat, leaving her open-mouthed, flesh draining of any resisting color; her eyes darted from me to the dirt under her feet, focusing devotedly on the sprouting weeds in shame—the smooth cracks in her guise shone crisp and drastic, unwelcome and gorgeous. I gritted my teeth, not giving the effort to wonder how she had expected me to follow such an evasion; my hands balled themselves into contemptuous fists, and for a second all I _really_ wanted to do was shatter the tombstone in front of us into a thousand untouchable, unmemorable pieces, scatter the 'Wife, Mother, and Friend' where no one would ever need to remember the words.

Her shoulders shook, and as if on cue a sheet of raven, auburn-streaked hair cascaded to shield her face from my view. "What," I asked, peeved, "is _with_ you and mentioning Aeris all the time?" Yet even her emergency barrier was no match for the flush that rose into her skin. "'Aeris' what? _My_ flower girl—I don't understand what you're getting at."

Tifa's lips began to move, and in the first moments I didn't have the peace of mind to realize she was speaking. The syllables were soft and barely audible, the sun's rays suddenly becoming much louder than they ever had been. It was in these seconds the muscles in her shoulders and back loosed, loosened to which her hair was given leave, and I could distinctly recognize the rueful smile at the corners of her mouth. And it was then that I realized the molding and shifting of the scenery around us, a detail I didn't think Tifa had noticed as of yet. I cursed, and her head turned, where at once the fake joy on her lips was obvious. "She's…the Cetra. The last Ancient. Your flower girl," she was saying, mumbling, almost incoherently.

"What? What are you talking about? I don't understand—"

"Your…Cetra…" I made the mistake of blinking, and in an instant she was gone, to be replaced by a white, slick concrete wall. Just behind me, to my right, was a door, and through the framework stood a short, middle-aged woman, gazing at me as if she didn't know where she was.

"Hullo, are you awake? Oh. Hullo." I responded with a nod in her direction, watching the corpse in my hands. The nurse kept talking, at last leaving me with a soulless body and a few departing words relating to keeping awake before slinking off. I kept my place, going over what had happened this encounter in my head—denial; she was in denial. I had broken through and now—disregarding the constant interruptions from the hospital staff—I was wearing on her. What else was there but to keep fighting a losing battle?—she was losing, as I recalled back on our interaction, she would continuing losing until the fact halted any further efforts.

They would need to have her heart monitored soon; her health was degenerating too quickly for anyone to do much about it but watch. I didn't leave immediately as I had the first time—I stared as her chest rise and fall, while listening to the permeating sounds of the comatose enveloping me. How much longer would it take until Tifa could scold me using her voice instead of her conscience? Questions came and went with her breath, following me even as another nurse interrupted my reflections to warn me of the time, shooing me away.

They followed me home, and continued to haunt me in my dreams…

* * *

Personally, I think Tifa's completely lost it, but that's just me. Anyways, here's chapter ten (after an stream of computer viruses and having to reformat the settings on my computer). I don't think I've ever gotten this far with anything I've wrote, so it makes me happy. Of course I couldn't have done it without all the support, so thanks!—I'm not as perseverant as Cloud is, and my attention span isn't as long as I would have most people believe. Not only so, but I'm also worried that Cloud's becoming too OOC, and its beginning to bother me… But yeah, next chapter coming soon, I promise! 

_Raine_


	12. Gloomy Sunday

_Chapter XI :: Gloomy Sunday_

_The rain falls silently, pattering on the grass and umbrellas and stone markers around us without sound. I cannot make out anyone's face around me, only that of the white-skinned priest, his voice low and droning. I stare at the coffin before me, knowing who lays inside and feeling my heart break at the knowledge._

_"…Let our hearts be deeply moved at this sight of death, and let us be mindful of our own frailty and mortality. Let us always walk in your wisdom and in obedience to your commandments with your help so that when we ourselves depart this world, we may experience a merciful judgment and rejoice in the everlasting happiness…"_

_The priest carries no umbrella, does not have one carried for him—his balding scalp falls mercy to the cold drops that land on his black robes and the small, pocket-sized book folded in his hands. I have no umbrella either. Yet I don't feel the rain. My suit is soaked through, my hair plastered to my face and my shoes leaking to the socks. It is now my vision of this scene blurs, the heat of my tears sliding down my cheeks, warming them of their chill. My hands fumble in my pant pockets, trying to keep the blood in my fingers. I am one of a small group, all crowded round the darkly-stained casket. Flowers pile upon it, absorbing the rain so that none reaches the one who rests inside. The cold bites at my face, despite the tears, numbing my nose and ears. I don't care—it is but a small price to pay._

_"…Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her  
__Deliver me, O Lord, from everlasting death on that dread day when the heavens and the earth shall be moved, and you shall come to judge the world by fire…"_

_Most of those who stand at my sides and in front of me cry. Many didn't even know her, I tell myself. It does not comfort me that they came. It merely makes me more aware—I was the only one who could safely claim that I knew her. All of her, the things that made her who she was: cheerful and optimistic, beautiful, kind. I am the only one, even among those who were closest to her, who knows what killed her. I know why she died._

_A man I recognize remains motionless next to me. His limbs are stiff, his own tears frozen as his body on his cheeks. Marlene holds her father's unmoving hand, her sobs the loudest of those who do weep—there are few things in this world that can transform her into the child she is, and this is one of them. She shakes and trembles, pressing herself against her father's leg to keep warm. Barret does not acknowledge her, his dark eyes fixed on the casket, quiet like the rain._

_"…May the Angels lead you into Paradise; may the Martyrs receive you at your coming…may the choirs of the Angels receive you, and may you, with the once poor Lazarus, have rest everlasting…"_

_I bow my head; why should I be ashamed of my pain? I loved this woman, made memories with her, talked and laughed with her—why now should I hide the tears that are forcing their way through my own barricade? I clench my fists in my pockets, resisting what I know: the truth. I want to block out the image of this day, the grey of the sky and the black of the umbrellas that fold over the heads of those who wait for the burial, so they can retreat to their homes and mourn in their private ways, or not mourn at all and continue on._

_The thought makes me sick, the notion of continuing._

_"…O God, through whose mercy the souls of the faithful find rest, be pleased to bless this grave. Send your holy Angel to keep it; and loose from the bonds of sin the souls of those whose bodies here lie buried, that they may ever rejoice in you with your Saints…"_

_The service is almost at its end—the priest's voice hums in my brain, his words muffled and soft. It holds a monotony of one who has done his job several times over, of one who has heard the cries of friends and families and lovers, and no longer feels the difference between life and death. He reads from his little book, casting out the tears and the remorse as he would demons—all are the same to him. I watch him, noting the arch of his back as he hunches over the grave, the cut of his hair as it curves over his ears, shutting out the silence of the rain._

_And it is then I notice her. She stands straight, drowned in black as everyone else, her umbrella tilted just so that her face is hidden from me, shadows cast over her eyes. But she cannot hide from me; I know who she is without having to see her face. My heart pounds in my chest, and as Barret shifts his weight to the other foot, I wonder for a moment that it may be heard by those around me, as it beats against my ribcage. Sensing my tunneled stare, her head comes up from the grass, her almond-shaped eyes focusing on me. My breath comes in short as she stands and watches me, unable to break away from sudden hold she takes. She eyes the coffin, then returns to me, but I do not move. My brain reels, unable to understand how this could work—she is dead, isn't she? If she is, then how could she be standing there, so solemn and unnoticed? I don't dare to blink, for fear of losing her a second time._

_"…Grant that while we grieve the departure of our sister from this life we remember that we are to follow her. Give us grace to make ready for that time by a devout and holy life. Protect us from a sudden and unprovided death. Teach us how to watch and pray so when the call comes we may be ready to meet the Bridegroom and go with him into life everlasting. This we ask too Father in Christ our Lord. Amen." He makes the Sign of the Cross, and one by one each person, coupled by their sorrow, leaves. Barret glances at me, and squeezes his daughter's hand in response to her sniffling. She is a strong girl, no doubt._

_The woman across from me does not move. After a moment it is only her and I, alone save for each other. I watch as she glides towards the casket, the hem of her dress rustling against the grass; wordlessly, she places a single cyclamen blossom atop all the other flowers that cover the coffin. I gaze at it, marveling at the curvature of the small purple-pink petals as they sprout from the sunken corms like flopping rabbit ears, the raindrops' landing muffled by their velvet delicacy. It is when I look up do I realize she is gone, and growing further away. I run to catch up with her, and grasp her arm to keep her from drifting. Her bare arm is cold, with nothing to protect it from the chill of the morning; I resist the urge to let go, holding on to her._

_"Tifa! What's going on?" Her eyes drill into my brain, searching. Her brow furrows, and she places an frigid ivory hand on my cheek._

_"You should go in, Cloud, before you catch a cold." It is not flat, her voice, but it hardly holds the love and happiness I once knew of her. She smiles slightly, sadly, reading my eyes; I take her hand in mine, busying myself with bringing the blood back into it while knowing my efforts are pointless._

_"What's happened, Tifa? How could you let this happen?" The despondency in my own voice frightens me. She shrugs lightly, glancing past me into the mist._

_"I wanted it. It's better this way."_

_Is it that simple? It certainly isn't enough. "How can it? You're gone. You're dead. How can that be better?" I can hear the pain in my own voice, the hopeless misery I feel when I look at her. Her skin is smooth, white to the rolling greys of the sky. Her dress is sheathed in black lace, strapless, wrapped tightly around her hollows and bones. The corner of my eyes sting when I see her; she brings her hand up again, to wipe at the tear that falls._

_"Don't cry, Cloud. Please, don't cry for me." In one fluid motion I pull her in, keeping her against me._

_"I'll tell you. It isn't better, it isn't. None of this is better, not you or the hospital—none of it!" I shudder. "I just want you back, that's all. I just want to hear your voice, listen to you speak and laugh. I've missed you so much."_

_"You're listening to me now, aren't you?" she asks._

_"It's not the same." I bury my face in her hair, once again inhaling that sweetly noxious scent of flowers I cannot name. "I want to see you _alive_. Like you were, before all of this…" I feel her sigh into my shoulder, and my head becomes light, weightless._

_"Before this…" It is as if she is remembering. "Please stop, Cloud. Give up. Don't come after me," she whispers. Her words, her voice is becoming ever the more harder to understand. "Leave me where I am. Let me go in _peace_. Please…" The words ring in my head, and as I feel the body beneath my fingers dissipate, I do not forget them. "Let me go…"_

--

I sat up in bed—or rather, on the couch. It had taken me several seconds to reassure myself that it had been a dream, a dreadful, mind-consuming nightmare, and when the realization came I straightened from the sheer horror of it. It figured that the one time I was able to fall asleep, I was haunted by such a vision like this. She'd said the same thing, Tifa, the one who still lived: "it's better this way…give up"—"don't try please…it's too late." An diminutive part of me wanted to do as she requested—a tired, exhausted part, the lazy and uncaring piece that would have thrown in the towel a while back; the one persona of myself that I absolutely detested, the one section of my being I could never be fully rid of. The one who constantly questioned my efforts, asking 'Why bother?' The one I needed to kill and couldn't.

But Tifa was still alive. She wasn't dead—_that_ was the difference.

I _was_ tired, and exhausted. I wanted this to be over, but I wasn't going to give up when victory seemed so close—_was_ so close. It merely made me wonder how many of Tifa's shields there were, how many guises of "I'm all right" I had to go through before I found _her_. How much could she smile, denying; how long could she confront me with a façade on her face and force herself into believing that I saw her the way she wanted me to see her, the way she wanted to see herself? I began to remember her smile, and questioned unconfidently whether most of the smiles she'd forced for us—for Avalanche and for me—had been as fake as the ones she'd shown me the past week, as blatant and as see-through; that it had been a failure on my part I hadn't realized the fallacy. Once again: if I hadn't noticed the signs while she was still ali—awake, how would I recognize her sincere form when it came? Once again, all I had to go by was gut instinct.

I led myself back to our most recent confrontation—too disturbed to attempt sleep, in any case. Out of her mind and into the real world, I knew now every answer she had provided to my inquires were lies, efforts to lead the conversation away from what I really wanted to know: the truth. Even towards the end, when her diversions became so obvious anyone could have been able to notice them, she refused to give in, to show me…

Why would she hide from me this much? What was it she so desperately needed to hide?

_I'm going to go back soon, really…I mean, I have to._ Meaning: she had no intention of ever returning to the living. Maybe she did like it where she was—whether she really did or not, or _pretend_ed to, in her mind, she wasn't, in all honesty, going to come with me willingly; without my interference, she would have stayed within the confines of her own conscience until her body lost what life she hadn't lost already. I had ruined her plans.

No _wonder_ she had been so angry.

The soft yellow light from the streetlamps fell across my torso, dipping to the hardwood floor and across the room. I shivered, despite the warmth of the summer evening. _…I'm sorry about those things I said. I didn't mean them. Not really._ I hated recalling exactly which words she had chosen to elucidate my unconscious cruelty, knowing full well she had meant very much of what she had said. I could only pray the comment about killing me—the part about ripping my heart out and making me eat it—hadn't been her honest desire…

_She's…the Cetra. The last Ancient. Your flower girl…_

I paused, listening to the sound of my own breathing. What _was_ with her constant referrals to Aeris? Whenever her name had been mentioned, regardless of what we'd been arguing about beforehand, Tifa would drop her defenses like stones and then spend the rest of our encounter rebuilding them while still trying to hide from me. I couldn't imagine how much resentment Tifa could hold for the woman, deceased as Aeris was—not much, surely? She possessed a certain antipathy towards _me_, that I knew. Yet as for her feelings towards the flower girl, I could only guess. Tifa was anything but weak—so how could such a name ignite so much pain simply by the sound of it?

Absently, I ran a hand through my hair, upset.

_I'm just wondering…why you're here. I can't imagine why you bothered coming all this way just to talk to me…_ She truly didn't understand. Or maybe she did—I couldn't fully be sure, not until _I_ learned to distinguish fiction from sincerity.

If I had learned anything through this, it was that women were complicated as all hell.

* * *

Poo. Cloud ramble—I really only posted this chapter because I love the dream sequence; I'm so proud of it. I wrote this while listening to the song "Duet" by Sigur Rós (cool Norwegians, highly recommended) at two in the morning, before I was even on chapter nine. Did you know you can get burial rites over the internet? I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I love the world we live in. Oh, and I forgot to put a disclaimer on the inscription on Tifa's mother's tombstone, 'cause it ain't mine. I got it from a movie somewhere (though I can't remember which), and liked the sound of it—sweet, simple, that sort of thing. Sorry! Anyways, I figure I can finish this story with a minimum of three chapters. Yay! And _thank you_ all for your constant support, as always!

_Raine_


	13. Désespoir, Part I

_Chapter XII :: Désespoir, Part I_

I saw her as I looked up from the blue cobbled street. I caught sight of her hair first stepping away from the doorway of my childhood home, untied and twisting about her face in the steady breeze whistling between the tightly-packed buildings; even with the heat of the sun to warm me, I couldn't help shuddering, from the sight of her as much as the wind. Her eyes flickered in my direction as I moved towards her, then shifted back to the empty gardens past the square. As I got closer, I heard her sigh.

"Hey."

"Hey." With little effort, much less than I would have had to exert as a child, I hoisted myself besides her atop the well, catching for a moment at the peaceful nothing surrounding us. At such close proximity, I snatched fragments of her flowery scent as her hair blew past me, but she didn't move away, if stiffening a bit at the nearness. As I searched for the words to say what I'd repeated over and over the past few days, a heavy silence fell.

"Cloud?" I glanced over at her; her eyes averted from the sight of me. "Do you remember this place?" My brow furrowed at the oddity of the question, then nodded, smiling slightly.

"What, the well? Of course I do, Tif—how could I not? This is where I told you I was leaving. We made our promise here…" She blinked, but otherwise didn't move. "I could never forget that. It's one of my childhood memories I _like_ to remember."

"We're older now, more mature." Her tone was deceptively cold. "We shouldn't keep hanging on to silly promises of 'knights in shining armor' anymore."

"You think it's silly?"

"I…it used to make me feel a bit safer, back before…the fire. It was nice to think about in Midgar, when I was alone. But now there's no point in bringing it up as anything more than a memory. That's all it is, just a memory." Her eyes had lost their focus, and she stared dimly into space. "I don't believe in it anymore. I'm not a child." Of course she wasn't—she spoke as if someone had accused her of being such, as though it were a bad thing. My heart swelled in my chest, crushing my lungs. "Promise me something else. Something real." Her voice was stronger than seconds before, determined, and it unnerved me more than it should have.

"'Something real'?"

"Promise me you won't come here anymore. You're wasting your time—I don't know _how_ many times I've asked you to leave. I guess…I should have told you not come back." I withheld a sigh, keeping my thoughts from imagining strangling her.

"What? Tifa…"

"I want this. I've wanted this more than I have for anything, ever. I've thought about it so much, back in Corel, in Junon—before that. Back when Papa was killed, when I thought everything I'd ever known was dead. In Midgar. Then after Aeris was..." She stopped herself from finishing the sentence, as if it might break me. Or her. She sniffed, and only then were the tears apparent to me. "I thought about it, after that, planning what I would do if I could muster up the courage to go through with it. In the end I never did; I was never brave enough. I was a coward. But now's my chance to finally have what I've dreamed of for such a long time. I can't feel it happening, not really—only unless I try. It would be so easy..."

For a moment, I couldn't find the words.

"You are many things, Tifa, but you are not a coward," I declared finally. At this she fixed me a steady, pleading gaze, as if she hadn't heard my statement for what it was. Her eyes glistened with held back emotion, as the final plea escaped her lips.

"I've never asked anything of you before. Not like this. Let it just be the one thing I want from you: let me go. Please, Cloud, don't come back. Spare me all this and just let me go. Nothing needs me over there—I'm not alive to begin with...I've already left them. All that's left is just this, this one little part. Cloud, do this for me. Don't come here anymore." I swallowed hard, not wanting to witness the pain in her face as I adamantly turned down her request. How could such a simple decision be so difficult?

"You're going to hate me, Tif, and I'm sorry, but I can't do that. You _know_ I can't do that." It took a second for the refusal to reach her, and as it did the tears were let free, cascading down the sides of her face in tiny rivulets; she closed her eyes, and I too turned away from her as her body began to tremble.

"Why not? What's wrong with it? I'm happy here…I'm fine with all of this." Her chin quivered.

I gritted my teeth, and prepared to explain to her once again, focusing predominantly on sheltering her from my irritation and keeping the bite from my voice. "I don't care whether or not you believe you're happy here. _I_'m not happy with you here. _I_ don't want to watch you die. I told you that _before_." Her hand rose her face, to cover the flush enveloping her paleness.

She sucked in a sob, wiping furiously at her face as if by will the tears would evaporate. "Everyone's happy. Everyone's found their peace. _I_ haven't—I never had it to _begin_ with." I opened my mouth, and shut it when I realized I couldn't speak for the surprise. "I put it away so patiently, _wait_ing for things to get better. Nothing ever did. Maybe they did before, when I found you at the train station, but not now—there's no chance for it!"

I remained silent, but found I couldn't look away—only once had I ever seen my best friend weep this much in my life; the tears were coming so strongly she was having trouble getting her breath in, much less trying to speak—only once, when her mother had died, and even then I'd cheated and snuck a peak inside her house through her bedroom window. Even then she had refused to cry this much, openly. She kept her head bowed, and I could merely stare at her chest rise and fall, her shoulders slumped; as I watched her try and hide herself from me, I puzzled over how she would react if I touched her, simply reached out and grasped her arm, what I would feel—would she shy away, cower as she had before? Or would she dissipate between my fingers?

I didn't try.

"I didn't think…" she said slowly. "—Barret told me…about what had happened to you, just before…I came here. At first I didn't think I could handle it, and then I thought I could—con_vinced_ myself I could. And then...I knew I couldn't." Her head came up slightly, to meet the sun and wind beating down on her. "This place—my parents aren't here, as I thought they would be. It's nice, I like it."

"…Why?"

Her eyes remained closed, as her emotions calmed. "I don't have any responsibilities here. I can do whatever I want. I don't have to worry about anyone but myself. I don't…lose anything, anyone. Being alone, really having time to myself…it's peaceful. I can reflect. Look back on my life." The crimson tint of her irises glowed in the sunlight as she blinked. "I didn't mean to…you know, hurt your feelings or anything before. But…that _was_ what you were doing, right? Reflecting?" I stopped.

"Yes."

"I don't want you to be angry with me, Cloud. I know why you're here, that you want to help me out of this." She was staring at me, holding me with those beautiful eyes and forcing me to face the truth both of us had been ignoring. "I really don't feel anything. I know…you want me to live, but…I don't want to live anymore. I don't want to care anymore, I don't want to have to search for a reason everyday to get up in the morning…" I couldn't move; I couldn't breathe. "_Please_."

She was so close, my arm would barely have to extend for me to reach her. Yet even at such a close proximity I couldn't feel any heat from her, only the cold leveling down from the mountainside. The glow in her eyes made my heart shudder, frozen with the somber desire for release.

A thought appeared, and I spoke without putting meaning to the words until she answered.

"I had meant to ask you about what happened in the Lifestream," I said. "I was thinking about it, a few days ago; I can't really remember much of it—I was unconscious, I don't know much of what you did…"

The smallest of smiles emerged, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come.

She sighed, and shrugged slightly. "I didn't 'do' anything. I just...you had it in you the entire time, all those memories inside you, hidden by the lies Jenova had you believing...I just helped you find them, is all. I didn't do much, not really." I was sure that wasn't the half of what she had done, yet she refused to go further into the matter—why had I believed any of my true memories over Jenova's inventions? How could I have told the difference between the two—between reality and fabrication? This gut instinct was telling me that she had done a hell lot more than 'just helped me find them.' "You said before…" she started, gently, "you didn't—couldn't watch my life waste away, that you wouldn't let it happen." The corners of her mouth twitched. "How were you planning on stopping me…?"

"I was surprised you thought I'd simply leave you alone." She nodded slowly; all her actions were muted, somehow, dimmed by the depression radiating from her. "You wouldn't give up on me, all those times I was convinced death was the right thing. It's time I returned the favour." I let the words drag as I paused. Her chest heaved.

"What if I told you," she said quietly, "that, in this one instance, death is the right thing?" I stole a glimpse at her figure, hunched over her knees, staring into space, unmoving.

"I have another question." SEQ CHAPTER h r 1She didn't even turn in my direction, her eyes directed faithfully on the ground far below. "Last time...you were going on about how happy you were here—'Ever since Aeris...' and then you just stopped talking. 'Ever since Aeris' what, Tif?" A profound flush almost instantaneously rose into her cheeks, and she tilted her head futilely to try and hide it. All there was to hear, for the proceeding seconds, was the call of birds beyond the mountain range.

"Ever since Aeris…_died_," she replied simply. With a sudden fluidness she began to rub her eyes were her palms, irritated. "I _was_ happy, here, the first complete freedom I've felt since he took her away from us…" She paused.

I stared at her. "I made you feel that way?"

"Not just you. A lot of different things. All of it added together made it seem so overwhelming…"

"I made you feel like that."

She closed her eyes. "Yes." But that was what I wanted, wasn't it, honesty? "I wanted to help you, as much as I could. All of us could see how much you missed her, how much her death bothered you…but you wouldn't let anyone help. You just left, like you were trying to erase what had happened…then Barret got that phone call. All I wanted to have the peace that you'd found, after so long…" Her voice trailed off; although I couldn't understand, I held strong doubts that she was lying now.

"Peace?" I said, puzzled. "When was this? Care to fill me in, because I don't think having to watch my best friend try to convince me that suicide is the answer qualifies as peace, Tifa." She shot me a look of distaste. "I haven't found peace."

"You're dead! You've finally left everything behind to be…happy. You don't have to worry about anything anymore, nothing that you would have if you were still alive…I want that kind of peace. I don't want to care anymore. I want to forget about everything and finally be free!"

I felt my blood run cold in my veins.

"You ran off and got yourself killed," she continued without pausing, "which is just as well. But now here _I_ am, making you come here to _stop_ me…"

"I'm not dead." I found myself forcing my voice to stay smooth, to keep the quivering and the frustration and the anger from her. She stopped speaking as abruptly as though I had slapped her in the face. I didn't feel I needed to see this reaction, but found I couldn't look away. "You thought this entire time that I was dead?" Of course she had—who had she come in contact with apart from me? And had _I_ bothered to explain it to her?

"That's what Barret said…" she defended. Her voice trembled. "He _told_ me you…body had been found outside of Corel…"

I despised myself more than I ever had Sephiroth. "I'm not dead, Tifa. I'm alive. I'm here, in the hospital, right now, sitting right next to you!"

"But the phone call…"

"It was a _mistake_!" I shouted, losing myself. "I was barely dead for two or three _minutes_ before they revived me—and even _that_'s a stretch! I'm _not_ dead!" She sucked in a sob. Her fingers were pale and thin as she raised her hand to her face, once again covering it in an attempt to hide.

"Stop yelling." She had shut her eyes against the light, losing whatever vigor inside her she had had left to protest the shock. "It's not true—it _can't_ be." She shook her head, assuring herself with more lies. Droplets of tears dappled her cheeks. "No! No, you're not! Barret said you were dead, he wouldn't _lie_ to me. Y-you're dead. You're just a ghost. You're not alive…how could you get here if you weren't? You _can't_ be…"

It was then I reach out to her, my hand falling gently on her shoulder, and the tears exploded from her eyes. I knew better than to try and stop them. The flesh beneath her thin cotton shirt was frigid as snow, and she shunned my touch as if it burned.

"It was all a mistake," I pressed, softly. "I was sick, and I _did_ stop breathing after coming to Corel, but they revived me." She had her head in her hands, as if by such a simple she could fall away, disappear inside a new solace I wouldn't be able to enter.

"W-why…why didn't they call us back? Why didn't they _tell_ us you were alive again?" Because the man who had delivered the news had originally hated Barret? Yes, that was appropriate.

"I don't know."

Silence.

"Please…leave…" Tifa wiped shakily at her cheeks, smearing paleness along her complexion.

"But Tif, you have to come with me…you have to wake up!" Her eyes remained shut tight, and for a second I thought she to push herself off the well and retreat into the desolate emptiness of her deserted little house. Yet she stayed, squeezing and digging her nails into her forearms for comfort.

"Please go."

I sensed the layers of my mind fold back into reality, and nodded, feebly, wanting to reach out to her again and touch her regardless of the response and regretting it when I didn't. I woke up with my face pressed up against the side of her thigh, my upper torso pressed down on the mattress. There was no nurse to bother me, not now, and I blinked, hating myself more and more as I stole a glance at my best friend's body. Of course she hadn't known. Why would she? It had been a completely ridiculous and unjustified notion to believe that she would automatically assume I was with her in mind as opposed to spirit, when she had no cause to think otherwise. Despite my efforts, I had hurt her once again, another tally for the record I was continuously building. Regardless of the realization of my behavior, was there nothing I could do to stop it?

But I was sure of one thing: I would make her see. I would force her to accept it, and, when the time came, I would convince her to live again.

* * *

Huzzah! Chapter 12 up and running…even if I did wait three months to update. Honestly, my schedule has been so consistently grueling and tiresome I'd forgotten all about this story (and the rest of my writing in general) until just a few days ago. I would personally like to thank Cloti for his/her review—your words of encouragement were a pleasant surprise, and I can truthfully say that you made my day (and quite possibly my past three months, as they have been absolutely hell-worthy). Hopefully it won't be another three months before I post again! Please keep reading and reviewing (it's really the only motivation I have right now).Thank you _so_ much! 

  
Raine 


	14. Désespoir, Part II

_Chapter XIII :: Désespoir, Part II_

I couldn't sleep. My nervousness made me jittery, unable to keep still. Barret had noticed it before, at dinner, and I was just beginning to acknowledge it now. I lay on the couch in my friend's living room, staring up at the ceiling and the oblong water stain, thinking of my comatose best friend and concentrating on keeping my body from shaking itself onto the floor. The reflections from the window cast smooth, liquid images on the walls, as the rain came down and battered the apartment in sheets. The lightening flashed across the house, and all my mind could occupy itself with was the thought of Tifa, alone in the private world of her unconsciousness, a world I had invaded, upsetting over the fact that I was not dead.

She hadn't known that I was alive. But of course—how could she have ever figured it out by herself? I recalled the expression that had taken control of her entire form, as my hand had rested itself on her frigid shoulder, as she felt the touch of another person's skin on her own; a complete physical representation of shock, of the disbelief that came when something so obvious there was no way anyone could have _not_ missed it was revealed. And as she no doubt hated herself for not realizing it, I hated myself for not telling her.

The expression flashed in my mind again. The misery made my chest ache with an invisible injury. And it wasn't as though she had recovered from the surprise, either—I had left her there, albeit unwillingly, to deal with her emotions by herself regardless of whether or not she was able to handle them. The guilt of it was more than that of when I'd come back, realizing her condition; the guilt that I had done it again, abandoned her to herself when, once more, it was so clear she wouldn't be able to handle it—if she hadn't a mere four months before, why was now any different?

Something was unsettled, and there was no way I was ever going to risk falling asleep when all Tifa had to do was simply stop breathing, stop caring again…

Before my mind had a chance to rationalize what my body was doing, I had dressed myself, and shut the front door gently behind me. The rain was coming in torrents upon the city, and the sound of the water slapping against the pavement and concrete was much louder without the stone walls to muffle the noise. I hesitated for just a moment, debating with myself on whether to go back in and retrieve an umbrella—I would be venturing out into the weather with or without it as it was. But I had risked an escape without waking any other of the apartment's inhabitants, and I couldn't risk it again. Not when my mission had become so imperative. I hugged my arms to my chest, and stepped out into the storm. The wind blew at my face, and I could feel the city's foundation shaking beneath my boots as each bout of thunder passed. Two blocks down the power had gone out, and without the artificial light to aid me, I was forced to rely on my memory—six weeks of walking the same sidewalks and turning the same corners—and the brief bursts of lightening that would illuminate the entire block, as I navigated my way to the hospital.

In the lobby on the comatose floor, the receptionist desk was closed, it's lamp off and the paper usually adorning the countertop shuffled neatly away. I knew without needing to check that there was no possible way for me to let myself in—visiting hours had been over since five; especially when the switch controlling the lock was _under_ the desk. So here I was, in a mental hospital in the middle of the night, acting purely on gut instinct.

Despite the hour, the lights in the foyer, though tuned down immensely from their original blinding hue, still provided enough light to direct me towards the chairs I wasn't sure _any_one ever used; I sat myself down across from the elevator, next to the door barricading me from the insanity. I occupied myself, in the minutes that strolled by, with desperately searching for any form of rationale for my impulsive decision—if I hadn't expected anyone to be here to welcome me, and if I hadn't expected everything to be just as it should be, then what _had_ I expected to find compelling myself out in the driving rain to come here?

My own solutions came up short, and did absolutely nothing to quell the feathers in my lungs.

It was the creaking of metal hinges that brought my attention from the panel flooring and the image of Tifa's face—Catherie stopped just as she began letting the door fall closed behind her, staring at me in utter surprise.

"Cloud…?" she said, when she had managed to find her voice. Her eyes narrowed; the door closed softly at her back, and the silence of the hospital beyond died away. "What are you doing here?"

I stood up. "I have to see her. Catherie, you have to let me in."

"_Cloud_," she hissed, "it's _one_ in the _morning_. Have you lost your _mind_?!" I would have laughed at the statement, by the sheer irony of it, in any other circumstance, had it not been for the insects gnawing at my nerves, and the honest possibility of the proposition.

"Catherie, it's very important!" She held her hands up, in an attempt to block my outrageous plea. "Tifa's going to die! If you don't let me in she'll die! You have to let me see her!" Arms crossed, she shot me a look.

"If she's going to die," she retorted sorely, "how is 'seeing' her going to help any? She's in a _coma_, for God's sake!" She looked exhausted—I didn't doubt that she was—and my presence surely wasn't helping. She closed her eyes, and couldn't hide the disappointment when she realized that I really was there as she opened them again, and that I wasn't going away.

"I know. I know." I paused, and dropped the volume of my voice just so. "Please, Cath, even if you never let me see her again, even if you never let me step foot in another hospital for the rest of my life, _please_. I just need to be with her. That's all I'm asking. She's my best friend. I need to see if she's all right." Here eyes scanned me, hunting for what exactly I couldn't be sure. When nothing from the ordinary besides my existence presenting itself, she sighed, and shook her head.

"You know I could lose my job for this."

My smile was curt. "Thank you." Her lips pursed, and she brought out her keys.

"Yeah, yeah." She moved quickly enough, though tired, and unlocked the door. Yet as I moved to enter, she sidestepped in front of me, blocking the way with her body and a dark, frustrated glare. "_Five_ minutes, got it? That's _it_. I'll come and get you when the times up." I nodded, and couldn't withhold a slight shiver at the repressed annoyance in her eyes. The wave of cold hitting me as I peered into the deserted rec room caused another shudder, as I made my way down the hall. Tifa's room was almost completely black, with only a small window above the bed, and I fumbled through the darkness for the chair by the bed, the claps of lightening brightening the room only for the briefest seconds; I felt as though I were intruding—Tifa could easily passed off as sleeping, as if by simply touching her, by breaking the silent dark, she would awaken…

I took her hand in mine, and shivered from the cold.

The sky opened up above me, and the cement and the clouds dissipated. The walls fell away, and the small town of Nibelheim sprouted about me. I was once again at the entrance to the town, and could see, vaguely, from my position a solitary, miniscule figure sitting on the well. Storms clouds rolled lazily across the night sky, and the ground smelled wet and cold. I wondered, with a sense of confusion, how long Tifa had been there—had she actually sat there through the storm?

Her eyes remained fixed on the ground as I moved towards her; I clambered up beside her on the well, and somehow didn't need to see to know that her hair, flat and dark and thick, was soaked, as were her clothes, the moisture just beginning to evaporate from her arms; she watched the stones with a troubled composure without uttering a single word.

"How long have you been sitting out here?"

"Since you left."

An icy breeze filtered across the cobbles, usual for a town built at the base of a mountain range, an unpleasant chill any native eventually learned to tolerate. The wind shuffled the clouds, and the midnight sky was littered with stars, all twinkling down without a care of what transpired below, as though this were reality, and the world I had left merely a dream.

"Aren't you tired?"

"I haven't slept well for a while." She shrugged again, with the same quiet resistance. "I've grown used to it."

"I know." Her eyes darted on me for the briefest of seconds. "Barret told me, that you hadn't been sleeping before…you came here." I wasn't entirely sure how to phrase it, but she nodded in response, catching my drift and going with it. "So you really want to be here."

She caught my abrupt surprise with a curt laugh. "Not as much as I thought I did." Pause. "A lot of what I thought…doesn't really hold anymore. I thought you were dead."

"I didn't know I had mattered that much to you…"

For a second as she allowed the silence in before replying, nearly led me to believe I had said something wrong. The corners of her lips upturned in a nearly invisible rueful smile, a levity that was barely there, utter irony. "You're my best friend. Of course you matter to me." Almost akin to a sixth sense, I knew by instinct she was keeping something from me, a detail, significant or unimportant I had no idea, and although I knew it couldn't have been healthy for either of us, I didn't question her.

"Enough to give up on life completely?"

Her breath caught.

"I did say before…it was a lot of things. You know. Being alone, that sort of thing…" She rubbed at her face, but there were no apparent tears for me to see. "You were just the last straw. The closest person I had…gone. I said I had thought about this before, it was just a matter of, you know, finding an excuse."

_…finding an excuse…_ My mind held on to the words, and I smiled at her.

"Do you still feel that way now?"

Her breath was soft. "I don't know what I feel anymore." And so was the beginning of the end: "I used to think that keeping secrets from people, not letting everyone see who I really was, was good. I don't remember when I started thinking that it was a necessity, that I wouldn't survive if I let myself become so vulnerable." She paused; the entirety of this world was silent. "It could have been in Midgar. I was used to having people know who I was—but then I lost everything, after Nibelheim. You could get lost in a city like Midgar. No one knew who I was, and no one cared. I figured out that I could live with keeping secrets. Lots of secrets." I could tell only through sideways glances that her eyes had lost focus. For a moment, I couldn't bring myself to say anything to disturb her reverie, which appeared more beneficial than not.

"It's not healthy, you know. To keep everything in," I said carefully.

She snorted, with more humor than before. "Apparently not."

"You…know me pretty well, don't you?" She glanced at me, and, after a second of realizing she had no idea where I was getting at, nodded suspiciously. "That's how you were able to help me. In the Lifestream."

"I guess…why?"

"It's just…here we are, in the same predicament, only with the roles reversed." I closed my eyes, blinked. "And I don't have the slightest clue _who_ you are. Hell, I didn't even know you were depressed until I got to Junon and Barret _told_ me about it." I could feel the anger rising up through my chest, tickling my lungs with gentle, irritating flippancy. Anger with things I couldn't control, and with the things I could have but never took the time nor the energy to change. "I want to be able to say I know you. I want to know you better than anyone else, know more about you than anyone else. Tell me something I don't know about you—your deepest darkest secret."

The smile that appeared from my request wasn't at all strong, existing not because it was forced but because there was no possible way she would comply. Her eyes remained struck on the endless expanse above us, and she shrugged, lightly, still grinning. "I can't tell you that," she said quietly. "It's a secret." She paused. "Maybe one day. When I'm less of a coward."

_…one day…_

"I don't know if I can go back, Cloud. Not after all this time." While she _was _smiling, and while the smile was genuine, there was something in those upturned lips that was so distressing, something so irrepressibly _sad_ about the way she was gazing at me now. "You say you don't know that much about me—no more than anyone else, but…you still _understand_ me, and you still _care_. That's important. I guess when Barret told me about the phone call, I felt like…like the one person I cared about the most, the one I worried about the most, the one who understood me the most, was gone—how is Barret, anyway? And Marlene?" I shook my head in disbelief.

"Worried about you. Marlene barely knows what happened. Everyone misses you. We _all_ miss you."

She swallowed. "They're not mad at me?"

"Mad? Why would they be mad? Tifa, not even the doctors think you're going to _live_. None of them know what's going on—for the record, I'm the only one who knows about all this..." I gestured, to the houses, to the mountains, to the stars above us.

"Oh." There was a certain lack of something, a lack of energy, as she spoke, and it merely proceeded to frustrate me further when she did not continue with anything else that would have helped me. "You've been in a coma for four months…almost five. I came to Junon a couple of weeks ago." I stared, taking her in as if this might very well have been the last I ever saw of her. The breeze sent strands of intertwining skeins flitting across her face, and every so often she would brush them away, without putting mind to the action. Her thin hands, pallid in the moonlight, glowed dimly as they lay on her lap, fidgeting for a moment, then falling still. She refused to look at me, now, as though it would disrupt the quiet.

She was a beautiful woman, Tifa.

"Please come back." She blew air through her nose, without spite; she allowed the stillness to deepen in her limbs. "I'm right here, sitting right next to you. You look like you're sleeping, Tif, and I'm holding your hand." She stole a glimpse at her hand, palm-upwards towards the night sky. "Just open your eyes, Tifa. Open them and see."

Tifa closed her eyes. "I can't."

"Stop saying that. I know you can."

She shook her head. "I can't. I've forgotten—I don't know how I got here in the _first_ place." We both paused.

"By wishing," I said, slowly. "You gave up everything to come here, Tif, every last thing. You wanted this that much. You have…to want going back just as much. You want to see Barret, and Marlene…and me." She clutched her forearms, tilting her head slightly to glimpse at me. "You want your life back?"

"Yes." She began to bite her lip, then stopped, grimacing. "What if…what if you're not there?"

"I _am_." I couldn't defend myself until she witnessed it for herself—for once, now, here was a promise, important in all of its honesty, that I could keep. "You can't fake this, Tifa. You have to want this more than anything." Pause. "You have to trust me." Her sideways glance suggested skepticism.

"You promise?"

I smiled, and promised, wholly.

And then, inhaling deeply air that didn't exist, she closed her eyes.

--

The first thing she notices is the quiet; it is not an absolute silence, not like the gentle soundlessness she has grown used to, in a place she cannot remember living. There is no light to see by, a blackness devoid of stars or sky, and, abruptly, without the sun to warm her, it is remarkably cold. She can feel her flesh rippling eagerly in the chill, despite the sheets cloaking her. She feels thin, and dangerously breakable. This quiet, the busy and productive cacophony by day muffled by darkness and sleep, begins to frighten her.

Where is she?

The mattress beneath her quivers, gently, and she freezes in fear, worried further by the lack of response her weakened muscles provide—a pressure, round and hardly there, presses itself against her leg, her thigh; it takes a moment, and then settles with a muted sigh. She glances in panic around at the room—she realizes now that it is a room, too cold and too surly with frigid organization to be a bedroom—searching for a reflection that might give some clue, some hint as to what, or who, is resting on the bed beside her. With no such luck, she shifts her weight, and, slowly sliding her atrophied arms to prop herself up, picking her head up from the pillow. For a second she does not see anything at all, and then the pain comes, searing across the black and forcing her back down into the bedclothes. The darkness swirls and dances above her, mocking violently, and any remaining thoughts evaporate from her mind.

She blinks, and waits for the movements to recede before giving another attempt, instead bringing her hand down, grazing the thin, grey sheets, and landing at last, without any apparent sting, on…hair.

Why is the feel of another person such a shock—why is this sensation so unfamiliar? But it was a comfort, a soft, unobtrusive assurance. Someone else is there with her, sleeping beside her. She finds herself smiling; she draws her hand back, running her fingers down to the scalp, though too nervous to venture further, to the hairline, the brow—too hesitant to discover the face beneath those locks. She wishes she could tell from the length and the cut of it who it belongs to. It is short, and cropped unevenly without order, like Cloud's…

Cloud. At first she does not remember that he is dead. She remembers instead the way he shuffled when in persistent thought, or the stupid flush that used to rise into his cheeks, revealing an irrational reluctance to speak. Details, small and important, about when he gave speeches, or gave orders, or simply stood and stared off into space, which had been more often than not. She remembers his eyes, the beautiful glow of his irises regardless of the mood he was in.

Her heart drifts towards the pit of her stomach, as she comes to realize Barret hadn't been kidding, and the reality that she hadn't been able to handle it.

Where _is_ she?

She closes her eyes—she recalls collapsing, the tickling numbness that had risen up her legs. The hospital, then? It would explain the silence, and the cold. She recalls praying that this abrupt bout would be her last, that fainting now would be the final time; she remembers wishing, finally, ultimately, to die.

Suddenly the stillness shatters, the door to her room eases open, and the light floods in.

"Cloud?" A woman whispers into the dark, hurried anxiousness swallowing her voice. For a moment there is no answer, then the intruder calls the name again, louder, and, closing her eyes, Tifa feels her heart, far in the depths of her intestinal tract, go numb. The body leaning on the bed is nudged awake with an irritated hiss.

He grunts, and picks his head off the bed. "Cath…what are _you_…?" She grabs his arm before he has a chance to complete the sentence, tugging him out of the chair and towing him towards the door, the light.

"Cloud." He resists her, glancing at the woman in the bed, still unmoving, still frozen. "You have to go. Time's up." There is a pause; Tifa doesn't dare move, afraid of the reaction she might have to opening her eyes and seeing Cloud Strife standing before her.

"I can't leave her, not now. It's so important—she's going to wake up, I _know_ it! I have to be here when she wakes up, I promised…!"

And it is then that she remembers—she remembers his voice, coaxing her, pleading with her and softening her. She recollects someone pulling the tears from her eyes, the absence of warmth from the sun, and the sweet, chilled taste of oxygen in her lungs.

She has been gone a long time.

Somehow she feels deprived of something, not merely the patch of warmth where the top of her friend's head had been lying against her. She still does not know with certainty where she is—where she has been—only that she is awake, Cloud is here. She has only a small grasp of what promise he is referring to, but the fact remains clear that, whatever this specific promise was, he has fulfilled it, in existing, in breathing—in living, he has accomplished what no one else had ever dared to do for her. "I told you," the woman snaps, in her quick, exhausted breath, "five minutes and that's _it_! I gave you _more_ than enough time, now let's go! If you're caught here we're _both_ in trouble."

Cloud sighs. "Will you tell her…tell her I was here. When she wakes up. _Vouch_ for me, so that she knows I kept my promise." The woman blows air through her nose.

"_Fine_, the promise, _if_ she wakes up. Now _come on_." He steals one last fleeting glimpse at the woman in the hospital bed, still not satisfied and knowing he has no hope of sleeping tonight, and leaves, abandoning his best friend alone, smiling through her confusion.

The door to her room closes as quickly as Catherie is able, suspending the room around her in a thick swarm of blackness; she opens her eyes, shivering from the cold in her limbs, and quickly changes her mind. Her voice slurs in her throat when she tries to speak, creating a noise similar to that if she were choking on her own saliva, though her throat was painfully dry. She wants to call out to them, yet doesn't dare try to move the rest of her body—not after what had happened on her first attempt.

She remembers the feel of Cloud's hair between her fingers, despite the haziness of her senses; she savours the seconds when he had been jarred awake, the moment of clarity when she had realized exactly who was nestled against her. Regardless of the impulse that had stopped her from crying out for him, she basks in this peace—she hears his voice, whispering through the room. The confusion is beginning to be replaced by cold, as the black seeps in, and the icy air rapidly focuses on the point where his head had before lay. She prevents the words from forming entirely in her mind, keeping the reality from overwhelming her.

Cloud is alive. She feels is skin on hers, the warmth of his touch, the tranquility brought by his voice, and she knows that his presence had been contained in a body and not conjured by her illness, that this brief happiness is not a sleep-deprived body's hopeful illusion.

Her eyes have begun to tear, and the chill of them make her body shiver as they slide in rivulets down the sides of her face and across her ears. In the stale frigidity of her new room cold quickly soaks the linens, without another body to help her own fight against it. She knows without having to see that her toes are not moving at her command, and while that in itself is worrisome, she feels a rejuvenated strength and confidence that had perished long ago spark and begin to burn...

* * *

Second to last chapter: done! I can't believe there is only one more chapter to go and then this is finished...though I also can't believe it took me nearlya year to complete a story that's only fifteen chapters long (or will be, once entirely done). I'm so lazy. Anyway, Tifa's awake! (_took_ Cloud long enough, he's so dumb). I'd like to ask for feedback on how I presented Cloud's feelings on Tifa, and vise versa—because, this fic being in Cloud's POV, he obviously doesn't know she's in love with him. Also, I had a hell of a time trying to keep this chapter from being too repetitive, from going around in circles; I'm glad it's over and done with, to say the least. And if you thought this was sappy, just wait for the last chapter.

Muchas gracias! Raine


	15. Her Most Beautiful Smile

_Chapter XIV : Her Most Beautiful Smile_

The sun rose slowly, creeping with deliberate care. Clouds were few, but thick and wide, and the morning sunlight blinked for succinct moments as the wind pressed the fleeting shadows over the city. Blacks weakened into steel grays, brightness and brilliance and color fading, the excitement of the night wasting to the terrible, wonderful monotony that was the everyday. The sun would be rising in Nibelheim, and the sun would be setting in Nibelheim.

My muscles were sore, from sitting for so long, tired and constricted. I felt dirty, the whole of me from the inside out—my skin stretched caked in a thick, irremovable layer of filth, my bones having gradually fragmented, and my internal organs liquefying into slick, excruciating masses. They churned and simmered beneath my flesh; I could feel them each rotting, disintegrating and melding—if I vomited now—which I felt very much like doing—the whole of my insides would come spilling out into the streets of Junon, and no one would have been awake to see them. Upon leaving the hospital, my boots sliding heavily across the tile flooring, my heart was the first to go. It went slowly, sinking as the sun does, unnoticeably, until it was so far gone I could merely feel the emptiness grow, and I missed it. I missed the small shred of life I had made that hadn't been entirely consumed by guilt, and as the sky cleared of the remaining traces of storm, as the clouds raced themselves to mask the sunrise, I wasn't sure I would be able to handle it.

I left her. If pressed I would have admitted I didn't give a damn about Catherie, nor her job at the psychiatric hospital—she was better off elsewhere and she knew it. What I did care about, however, was Tifa. I cared about Tifa, more than anyone could have guessed, and that fact remained. It remained, frozen and set, right alongside the reality that I had left her.

_You can't fake this, Tifa…you have to trust me._

I sat hunched over on the sidewalk a block from the hospital, unwilling to leave completely and entirely uneager to return home so soon. _Home._ I had lived in this city for approximately five weeks and three days, and now I was prepared to leave it, abandon it wholeheartedly for the life I had adopted after Meteor, now that I had succeeded in utterly destroying the last lives _I_ had trusted myself to care for.

Standing was harder than it should have been, the broken shards of my joints crushing together as I struggled to stand. The sun, flaming orange and magenta and red, had risen completely, if not entirely visible because of the towering edifices blocking most of the oceanic horizon. The pace I took while heading back to Barret's apartment was sluggish and deliberate; I would stop occasionally, standing amidst any stray skein of sunlight and feeling the last strangled clumps of rain evaporate from my clothing. It was a purely physical pleasure, pure in all sense of the word. My life was in its last dying minutes, shortening with each step I took, and with my body dissipating and my will to continue deteriorating, I would never be free to experience pleasure or happiness to any emotional purity. I paused, reaching my destination, and stared up at the window floors up above my head; I could have caught glimpses of moving figures within in the building, had I made the effort, but I didn't make the effort, and refocused my energy towards the squares of concrete moving under my feet.

The apartment, in a brief, slow second, was silent as I closed the front door behind me. Then Marlene came into the kitchen, and proceeded to stare at my guilty, listless self and hide whatever immediate thoughts that came to her behind two large green eyes. Barret, hearing his daughter's silence, followed suit.

"Where were _you_?" He was in the process of slipping one arm into his jacket, neither of his shoelaces tied and another wrinkle having sprouted in the corner of his mouth. Marlene did not leave, keeping steady a gaze I would have otherwise found unnerving. "The hospital called. Stop mopin' around and let's go."

I wasn't moping; I didn't mope. I was not nervous in the same way Barret was nervous, with his frenzied panic. Unlike him, unlike Marlene, unlike the rest of the outside world, I knew why that phone call had been made, and I wasn't at all prepared for the consequences. "I was taking a walk," I said quietly. The little girl at the other end of the kitchen opened her mouth, closed it again. When I made no effort to move, Barret shot me a look, and though the threat lacked a certain verve, it was not hindered by way of overall effectiveness—I found myself out in the street once more, my friend quickly having forecasted to his daughter the uncertain time we would be coming back. Her voice was a hesitant whine as he closed the door, and shoved me down the stairs.

His heels clapped anxiously against the pavement, and at my lagging, disheartened pace, he came near to losing me in the streets several times on our short journey to the hospital. He would stop, glance back and wait for me, glaring to partially hide the haste, but I never returned the gesture, keeping my eyes downcast. I wasn't sure I would ever be able to look him in the eye again. Although he was nervous, and worried, as was completely natural and entirely expected, even he possessed a certain hope—the hope of ignorance, a hope bred from too much silence and too little faith.

The floor upon entrance did not emanate any particular sense of urgency—I, of all people, would have noticed if there had; yet there was _some_thing, an underlying aura of discord amid the ward, an essence of disturbance of the routine. Small details, facets that would otherwise have made no difference whatsoever, were scattered throughout the receptionist lobby. And I caught them, observing and holding the discrepancies, while Barret was forced to negotiate with a receptionist who was not Catherie, who coerced him into signing a complete visitor's form anyway. Her hazel eyes fluttered to my position sulking behind him, and her round face paled slightly, though Barret took no notice of the change. He stepped large and full, and I followed, slovenly, feeling the stare of the substitute secretary burning holes in my back.

This, of course, was nothing compared to the stares we received in the rec room. Those able turned, albeit slowly, and positioned themselves comfortably enough in preparation for viewing the events without requiring much movement in their seats. These were not angry, resentful stares—the blaming and hateful kind. These patients, deciding the occasion important enough to deserve attention, stared with curious, almost jealous intensity, the type only those in semi-comatose and vegetative states were capable of providing. My companion didn't heed them, and gave a rushed nod towards one of the sideline nurses—she automatically understood, catching sight of me, and led us through a pair of swinging doors, away from the rec room and the empty eyes and in the opposite direction of the dorms. Beyond was another larger room, another foyer, one that I hadn't known existed or cared to mind in all the weeks I'd visited. This room connected with two hallways, one carpeted and the other veering off to the right. At the entrance to the grey-carpeted hallway stood Catherie, her arms folded across her chest and all blood having drained from her flesh. She glanced at the nurse ahead of us, then towards Barret, and finally me—her reaction was the same as the night before, eyes widening to where all three of us could see the dark red circles sagging beneath them.

The other nurse continued with only a blink of acknowledgement towards the flustered receptionist, and indicated for us to wait outside another door, disappearing into the room and letting it close gently behind her. Catherie leaned over to me—up close I could see she had probably gotten as much sleep as I had—and hissed.

"What the _hell_ did you _do_ to her?" I didn't get the chance to respond, not before Barret clutched my arm and pulled me inside.

It was a nice office, as far as doctor's offices go. That much I was able to recognize. Directly in front of us was the desk, the wall behind covered completely with books and pamphlets and dossiers. This I used to avert my gaze from the man who had risen from his chair as Barret and I had appeared in the room, a man I hadn't seen in nearly four weeks, once he, like the rest of the hospital and staff, had gotten used to my regular visits. His face was, for the most part, unreadable, even when his greetings reached me, and my presence was acknowledged officially. The air we had entered was thicker than the humidity that swarmed outside, pungent with what I was too anxious and too exhausted to discern; I focused on the potted plants strategically positioned in each corner of the room, repeatedly swallowing to keep my ears from popping in the thickness. It smelled too sterile here for a psychiatrist's office, as centered in the ward as it was.

The doctor rounded his desk, yet didn't move towards us; instead he was about to encourage us forward.

A disturbance in the depths beat him to it.

I would never be sure what it was that moved—it was several things, perhaps, combined to generate a noticeably whole and overwhelming difference. The doctor shifting his weight to one foot, all of Barret's muscles and organs freezing, another nurse at the front of the room beside one of the armchairs opening her mouth to speak, eyes downcast. But it would be my muscles, my mind, and my heart which stopped. All as an ashen, broken figure adamantly hoisted herself up out of the left armchair, white hospital gown cascading down to her ankles, dark, straight tangles of hair falling across her face, shielding it.

But she couldn't hide from me; I knew who she was without having to see her face.

Her eyes were brown, and her hair was black, both limp and flat. Her knuckles were like pearls, white under the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling, smooth from her grasp on the arm of the chair. The nurse, standing behind her, hesitantly moved as if to stop her when the patient's grip loosened, as she began to move away towards the back of the office. But Tifa was on a mission. I could _hear_ the atrophied muscles in her legs struggling to function, her joints and limbs moving with weak but persistent fragility. She could barely walk, but it was better than any of the other patients on this floor could do.

She didn't look at me. She took painstaking, deliberate care in not looking at me, instead focusing on the floor and her feet and the distance she would have to traverse in order to reach us. Barret's breath came in short and hurried beside me, as if he was too preoccupied to breathe; he was too busy watching as Tifa made her way across the room, listening to the sound of her footsteps as the hospital sandals slipped on the tile, anticipating the moment when she was in front of him. She brought her head up, letting the sheets of hair fall back, revealing her eyes and her lips and her face, all concentrating on the effort it would take to smile back at him. The slightest of pauses, and then she gave all energy to throw her arms around his broad shoulders, sacrificing her balance in the faith that he would catch her. For Barret, the shock took its time in receding, until he returned the gesture, and they embraced. It was a ridiculous image, the two of them—touching and beautiful, yes, but ridiculous all the same.

No one said anything. I stared, anticipating.

Tifa sniffed repeatedly, possessing the strength to keep from bawling outright, yet without the ability to keep herself composed. Her hands slipped down from his back, and they parted, slowly. Immediately, her eyes found the floor, but it wasn't to concentrate on her steps—Barret kept a firm grip on her arm, steadying her. I was barely a foot to the side of him, yet her pace was markedly unhurried; her gaze was steady, slightly reluctant and too apprehensive to glance up at me too soon.

She did look up, though, in a wavering glimpse, only when she was directly in front of me, and had put off the act for as long as possible.

She brought her hands up, shakily, then let them drop. Her fingers were gaunt, like the rest of her, and they rose again, brushing against my shoulder and sending a jolt of shivers through her small frame—which happened promptly whenever there was further direct contact. They rose up, gradually higher, and her tongue slicked across her lips to catch the tears as they fell. Her hands found my face, seeing for her, tracing with touch my neck and the sides of my cheeks. Her eyes swirled; eventually they, too, lifted, sodden with a thousand emotions all reeling and tumbling, all paralleling the frown plastered to her ashen lips.

Tifa wrapped her arms around the my neck. She hugged me, and began to cry. I returned the gesture. Her flesh was cold, and her tears had begun to soak into the collar of my shirt.

It was nice.

I hugged her back, clutching with gradually increasing force until I was pulling all of my energy into not wanting to let her go. There were hardly any soft spots on her, where on a healthy woman there would have been plush and supple, and I hugged what was left with the realization that soon, eventually, she would be healthy again. Because I wasn't going anywhere. Because _she_ wasn't going anywhere.

We only broke apart when someone coughed—although there were only three other people in the room, I was unable to pinpoint just who it was who had interrupted our reunion. Tifa, however, didn't complain, if showing the slight strain of reluctance before breaking off completely. I kept my eyes on her, watching her, suddenly unable to hear anything other than the sounds of life emanating from our bodies.

The doctor nodded to the nurse, then, striding along side her scurrying, came up to us. "Will you please take her back to her room?" He thanked the nurse, and a shudder from Tifa passed through me. "I'd like to speak to Mr. Wallace and Mr. Strife privately…"

I spoke before he had the chance to continue, a very large part of me protesting the words that were coming from him. "I'll…go with her, if that's okay." I eyed Barret, "You can tell me everything later." His lips simply thinned in response, until he too closed his eyes and nodded. Tifa's doctor agreed, and Tifa didn't say anything at all. I could tell she was relieved by how the jolts in her composure had ceased. The nurse gripped Tifa's other hand to steady her as we walked, and we headed out into the hallway. Catherie, who was still, stubbornly, deliberately positioned ahead of the door had her eyes, glimpsing only at me for a second, focused dutifully on the patient, who, upon staggering out the doctor's office and having expended most of the energy required to stand—much less walk—was leaning on me for the needed support. She couldn't have weighed, at best, more than a hundred pounds.

The walk back to the dorm was agonizingly slow, merely because the nurse, assuming full and eager responsibility of making sure Tifa made it to her room in one piece, set the pace to a crawl even a baby would have been discontented with. When we arrived at our destination, finally, she surprised me by, after seeing Tifa securely seated on the bed with minimal chance of falling off, passing out, or otherwise having need for her services, left us, both, alone, with the silence.

I didn't know what to expect; the object of thanks had never crossed my mind. But never would I have guessed that Tifa was capable of forgetting everything that had happened in the past month.

Her eyes rose, again slowly. "When did you get back?" Her voice was smaller than I remembered, smaller than that of her conscience; she was hardly a foot beside me, and yet I could only hear the smoothness as a whisper, hesitant and afraid. I looked at her, confused, yet my gaze didn't seem to inspire any recollection of our conversations, my battles.

"You don't remember? I told you when I…" I faltered.

Her brow furrowed. "You told me when?"

I couldn't think of what to do. I had to start over. Did it mean that she had regressed in the past hours back to the same mentality that had driven her to hide in the first place? Or did she want to live, knowing I was alive, merely because I was alive? Did she realize now that she didn't have to keep secrets?

Then, maybe, almost, she didn't realize that I hadn't been there when she had awoken…

So lost in thought as I was, the sound of her breath came as a shock. "When you were here last night?" Here as in the hospital. I stared at her in disbelief.

"Tifa," I started, "I'm so sorry I couldn't be there. Catherie only let me have five minutes, and most of that time I spent…trying to get you to wake up. She wouldn't let me stay—she said she'd tell you that I was here, I asked her to…" I couldn't find the words. She was staring at me in puzzlement, trying to make sense of my rambling. For a second, neither of us said anything at all; we sat in awkward quiet.

"Catherie…she's the nurse in the hallway, right?"

I nodded, slowly. "That was her, but she's not a nurse, she's a secretary, at the front desk. She's the one who let me in last night to see you."

"Isn't that against the rules?" she asked, carefully. "That's why you left so suddenly." She didn't lose the confounded countenance, but she didn't need any affirmation on my part to know that she was right. "I figured as much. And she did come to see me, after the doctors and nurses and everybody had had their turn. She said that you've visited me in hospital since you got to Junon." A pause. "She said you had something to tell me, when you got here…" For the moment I didn't understand that she expected an answer to her question, and before I shrugged in response I came to terms with the fact that I had no idea as to what Catherie had been referring.

"Maybe she'll tell me what that is exactly, next time I see her." We both smiled.

"What happened?" Her hands, in their usual, indecisive manner, wrung themselves in her lap.

"You don't remember?"

She shook her head. "I remember…fainting in Marlene's bedroom—it _was_ Marlene's room, wasn't it? That was sometime after Barret told me about the…the phone call and everything." Abruptly, her eyes rose, and she stared at me, waiting for me to disappear, anticipating the end to the dream. She bit her lip—it was apparent she had done so several times today, by the rawness of the flesh beneath her teeth. "I woke up here, and you were here, and you're still here, and I don't know what's going on…"

My hand rose instinctively, to reassure her, and I forced myself through conscious reluctance to keep from touching her. With everything she didn't know, it might frighten her away. Instead, I smiled, gently, and sighed.

I'd lost count how many times I had tried to explain this. "It was a mistake…" I described to her the faults and the mistrust that had passed from one messenger to the next, that by the time she herself had received the news I had been alive again, only no one had bothered to tell either her or Barret. Her brow furrowed, creating what seemed to be, for a while, permanent lines above her sunken eyes. I finished with apologizing, profusely. I should have called sooner than I had.

Tifa shook her head. "I can't believe it."

"Neither can I," I agreed, tentatively. "But here I am. I'm not going anywhere." A fresh storm of tears were slowly beginning to break their way through the makeshift cast she had carefully constructed upon expending the past batch back in the office; she closed her eyes, and bit her lip to keep them off—it was all she could do to keep from crying, exhausted as she was. After a moment, she refocused her gaze on me, reaching for my hand. I squeezed her in return, and her lips, sore from the habit, upturned in a tiny smile. "You're going to be all right, Tifa," I said.

* * *

So much for completing this story within a year...so sorry everyone! In any case, I've decided to take Cloti's advice and split the final chapter into two, for a variety of reasons, one of the biggest being I had not originally thought thatit would take me six months to update. My sincerest apologies to all of you! Thank you for being so patient with me! Furthermore, as a large chunk of the next chapter (what was supposed to be the end of this chapter) has already been written (last year, in fact), I'll give my very best effort to publish the final chapter ASAP (namely, within the next two months, because that's summer, and by that point, starting next week, I'll actually have _time_to work on this).

Also, I've finally remembered where exactly the inscription on Tifa's mother's tombstone came from, so if any of you would like to give that a shot, go right ahead! To be revealed in the next/final chapter!

Once again, thank you for all your patience, Raine.


	16. To Take, To Hold

_Chapter XV : To Take...To Hold_

The flowers hardly distracted her for more than a few minutes, at the most. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, obviously displeased with what she saw. Her eyes kept on the image of herself, as she inhaled with disheartened interest. She exhaled in a sigh, and blinked.

"You make it worse when you frown," I commented gently. Her eyes darted to my image in the mirror, but she didn't bother to turn and look. Small wrinkles were forming on her brow above her eyebrows, and her lips were beginning to become used to being weighed down around the edges. She had been crying recently; her eyes were red, the swelling lessening.

"I can't help it…I didn't realize I lost so much weight…"

"You'll gain it back."

Tifa had been moved, some weeks ago, to another floor, only after proving to the staff and her primary doctor—who, as I would soon discover, was one of many—that she wasn't about to be influenced by the rest of the comatose patients and regress into her previous state. And unlike before, I stopped counting the days and the weeks in which the doctors kept her at the hospital. I stopped putting a time frame on how long she stayed there, on how many days I visited her (many, to be sure). Such numbers didn't seem important anymore—they actually, after a while, began to depress me, and I attempted to avoid counting down to the day she would ultimately leave, the day when she would finally come home, as much as humanly possible.

As it was, her new room was much better furnished than the one in which she had previously resided—it had been furnished and designed with the intent of housing _functioning_ human beings, the conscious ones, within its walls. There was a bed, a beside table and lamp, and a dresser with an unframed mirror tacked to the wall above it; and while none of anything was decorated to the point of absolute hominess, compared to its precursor, even I had to admit the room was a significant improvement. Tifa hadn't adjusted well to her fellow boarders on the other ward, either—for the most part, their unrelenting gazes had frightened her. So, she had had to make do with the antisocial, although moving, neighbors shuffling about on this floor, until the day when Barret and I came to take her home.

Today was that day. Barret was off, at the moment, taking care of the massive amounts of paperwork the secretary here was having him complete. I sat at the foot of Tifa's bed, watching her stare despondently in the mirror above her dresser, as we waiting anxiously for the man to return. What few clothes she had been resigned to bring (for what patient needs clothes when she's not allowed to leave the ward?) were packed and ready, and all that was left now was to anticipate the journey home. This was not the end of the battle for any one of us, by far—Tifa still had months of physical therapy in the weeks ahead, to get herself back into the shape remotely resembling that which she had been in before this entire mess had even started. She had gained little weight from the evening of her awakening to this point, and she didn't look much different from that day save for the glow slowly returning to her eyes. The fact of the matter was, with the new room came a new mirror, and Tifa was not adjusting well to the new image that was currently frowning back at her. We were the only people in the room at the moment, and no one was around to misinterpret her reaction as she stared back at the sunken eyes and protruding cheekbones. This wasn't the first time she had been met with this reflection, but the hurt and the disappointment were the same, and I could only guess that with each fresh day she somehow expected herself to look different than she had the night before. Though most of her response was kept in control while I dutifully sat behind her, she had learned to give up attempting to keep a clean and unemotional guise when I was around—which happened to be practically every hour I was able—and I could tell from the information she was willing to leak that she was still not contented with her appearance.

_I_ wouldn't be either, personally, if I looked the way she did.

But that was beside the point. Tifa was coming home today.

"You like the flowers?" This did manage to distract her again. She shifted, and her head creaked downwards until all her reflection showed was the top of her head. She inhaled, deeply, and sighed again.

"Yes. They're beautiful. Thank you." I nodded, slowly, but didn't say anything for a short minute. It was only for so long that I was able to at least interest her with stories of the past two years; I had long since expended the use of anecdotes to spur conversation.

I'd early on learned my lesson attempting to bring up anything regarding Nibelheim, or the past months, the famed week, week and a half I'd spent convincing her to live—she didn't remember anything; it was useless to constantly, relentlessly interrogate her on something she so obviously couldn't remember, regardless of how much I doubted her. And I did doubt her; on occasion flashes of recognition would streak across her face, her eyes glowing with the essence of understanding. Yet as quickly they came they would vanish, disappear with alarming efficiency until her look was nothing more than a hopeful, ignorant stare. She didn't seem to notice anything from the ordinary, as ordinary as things happened to be, and while many chances had arisen where we would have been able to talk freely, privately, on the subject, she never brought it up, she always denied knowing. Having for the time being given up on attempting to discuss this sensitive subject, I was once again helpless.

I hated being helpless.

Abruptly, a firm rasping came from the door, and it creaked open, revealing Barret's face. He glanced at us as though he somehow expected us to be doing something naughty on the floor. After a millisecond of hesitation, he came in, cautiously beaming.

"We're ready, let's go." He said it in his Avalanche voice, his 'may I command and be obeyed' leader's voice; a tone so rare it made me nostalgic. The final traces of melancholy evaporated from the woman sitting beside me, and she rose, shakily wiping at her slacks and blouse of imaginary debris.

"Finally! Let's go." Her eagerness shouldn't have surprised me, yet, for some unknown reason, it did. I took her arm, half-smiling, anxiously, and Barret grabbed her bags. He led us with vigor out of the room, into the hallway, into the rec room, with haste. Neither of them were as used to this environment as I was.

There was a small aggregation of people in the ward lobby, to see us off; doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, various staff. Some patients were there. Catherie was there; she didn't bother looking at Tifa—she'd seen enough of Tifa. She stared at me, openly and without reservation, still suspicious, curious. As the rest of the group delivered their farewells and well-wishes to Barret and Tifa and I, she pulled me aside, long, manicured fingernails digging into the pathetic tan of my bicep. Still grasping on, her eyes focused a hard, dissecting stare directly at my face, holding it there, unmoving. This went on for several seconds before she drew back slightly, her lips parting.

"I don't know why I trust you. We're both lucky, is all I can say." I was resolved to nod, the hair standing on the back of my neck protesting the impulse to smile politely. She shifted her shoulders in response, to face me square on, formally, officially.

"Thanks, Catherie. For everything."

She did smile at this, for the most part. "Hey, don't worry about it." She detached her hand and laid it on my shoulder—suddenly reaching my own height in the process—patting me. "Take of yourself. And her." She jerked her head in Tifa's direction; Tifa was stealing glimpses at us, the awkward, phony couple we make, between handshakes and tolerant smiles, her teeth bared. The group of us had begun to move towards the elevator.

I tried not to take pictures, in my head, of this place. "I will."

She seemed satisfied, enough.

--

She's sitting at the kitchen table. Some moments ago she was at the sink, washing away the remnants of her first meal home in four months, glad for something to do. Now she has nothing to do, only to wait, at the table, staring at Barret and smiling at Marlene. Somehow, she manages to do these two things at once. The two are fighting, the little girl resisting all and every attempt her father has made towards putting her to bed.

The entire afternoon, and for most of the evening, has gone by in an unmemorable blur. I stand behind the kitchen table, near the door, also staring at the father-daughter pair, because I also have nothing better to do. We're both waiting for the night to come undeniably, where there will be no excuses that we can hide in, nothing to keep us from the inevitable; I can tell this idea still has not occurred to Barret, and I know that Marlene, too high on joy and excitement to sleep, has no reason to suspect anything is amiss. She can barely speak, as it is. Today was her last cooking entire meals on a regular basis, for the most part, washing the dishes, keeping the household—she'll be seven this fall. She'll have better things to do. She was only once able to visit Tifa in the hospital, as her father promised some time ago, and now she reacts to his orders not wanting the gaiety to end, like a child on holiday.

After the struggle, Barret bids his farewells. He only reluctantly retires because I am still awake, openly unnerved by Tifa's remark, "Don't you think I've slept enough already? I'm not tired." She is exhausted, both us men can tell—that's what there is to read from the look Barret shoots me from across the kitchen as he departs.

When we're alone, she smiles at me. My presence makes her nervous; simply my being there, my being awake, _wait_ing for her, is enough to pressure her into following Barret's advice.

She begins toward her room, in a roundabout way, hesitating at the door. She raises her hand, as if to knock, pretending to be an intruder in someone else's home—her reaction was the same, earlier today, when it came time to drop her bags and become reacquainted with her former bedroom, halting in blatant apprehension of the consequences of her actions. However, Marlene nor Barret are here—possibly not even awake—to witness this, only me. And of course, now she has a bit more reason to be afraid. Pressing her palm again the wood, she pushes the door open and disappears inside, never glancing at me, leaving the door slightly ajar. It filters a dark, thick light into the hallway from the lamp on her dresser. From the kitchen, I watch her travel from the doorway to the bathroom on the other side of the hall.

It's cool enough tonight to sleep in an undershirt, if not enough for anything more than that. I make myself comfortable on the couch, and slowly, I ease myself into sleep, drawn by the darkness coming from the now-empty bathroom…

I don't know what time it is when I awake, too busy lamenting on my decision to underestimate my own body's ability to produce heat, only that it is not morning. My face is flushed, a small sweat encasing my chest, neck and arms. The light from the streetlamps is constant, gently pliable—it is with this which I am able to catch sight of the room, the ceiling stain…the figure, black and obscure, positioned neatly on the glass coffee table, looming over me. My heart jumps, startled, and I freeze, a defense mechanism inherited from small rodents. I stare at the form unable to move, trying to make sense of its bends and curves through sleep-hazed eyes.

"I'm sorry." Tifa's voice is so soft and low I can barely make out the words, much less try and decipher the tone, or even a reason for her quiet. She and I both know she shouldn't be awake at this hour of the morning, whatever hour that may be. She doesn't make any effort to move away, to head back to her room, to allow me to recover from the surprise.

"What are you doing awake?" The stiffness in my limbs receding, I slowly sit myself upright, allowing the sheets to slide into my lap. As my eyes adjust further to the dimness, I manage to notice the nearly nonexistent movement in her arms—no other part of her seems to be moving, the rest of her eerily inert; she's holding herself that way. "Are you cold? Here, come sit. You can wrap yourself up." So intent on her endeavor, she doesn't respond immediately, gazing at me with skepticism. Her movements are the same, unconscious, careful, as though she worries secretly she'll break.

I worry that too, sometimes.

"I'm okay." But it's too late for that. She's close enough I can feel her cold, and I adjust so I can drape the sheet around both our shoulders. She is cold enough to cool me, at this distance. Gods, she is so thin.

"What are you doing here?" I repeat the question.

"Just thinking." She embraces herself, to smooth the gooseflesh running down the length of her arms. Without thinking, I put my hands on her shoulders, feeling the bones beneath the sheets, and smooth the gooseflesh.

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm okay." Almost immediately following saying so, she sighs, not unlike she would to completely contradict the words. I don't need this cue not to believe her, but only with it am I able to press the matter as far as I do.

"What were you thinking about?" I venture.

Tifa gazes at the floor, lost in the carpet. "…A lot of things." I squeeze her, urging her onward. In the yellow light from the window, I can see her eyes begin to glisten. "I was thinking about my parents. When I saw them in my bedroom. I always told myself they weren't real, that it was just the hallucinations. I could live with it if they weren't real, or I didn't know that they were real. They were just figments of my imagination." She says it wistfully, "Stuff from my head." Her nose twitches. She sniffs, reluctantly. "I saw a lot of people, but I wouldn't let myself believe that any of them were real. It didn't matter to me that all of them were dead in real life. I _still_ wouldn't have believed it either, even after you came into the picture, if it hadn't been for that stupid phone call…" She let the words dissipate. It was good for her, to experience anger.

"But it never occurred to me to talk to them. I had the opportunity to tell them that I missed them…that I loved them. But they just disappeared, and I never saw them again." Her hand rises to her face, and she rubs her eyes, irritated by her tears. "I could have told them so _much_, and I just let them go, just like that!"

"But…I'm sure they knew that already, Tif. Wouldn't they? Of course you love them, and of course you miss them. I'm sure they knew that without you having to tell them." I don't need to think about the words; I don't need confirmation to know that they're true.

"You really think so?"

"I do."

Tifa smiles, slightly, remembering. "And when you visited me in the hospital last night, I thought that was a dream too. I didn't know how much time had passed, or where I was. I thought I was just hallucinating again. Then you started talking…you shook the bed when you got up, too. _That_ felt real." At this she laughs, finding something funny in the statement. "I was so confused. I had no _idea_ what was going on, _especially_ when that woman—Catherie?—when she came into my room. I couldn't believe it." There is a paused, the silence broken only by the faint sounds of wilderness beyond the city lights, and the dull, constant roar of Barret's snoring. "I still don't." Then she yawns, and drifts back into the pillows, easing herself down. "I didn't go back to sleep after you left," she says.

"You don't want to go back to your room, do you?" I don't need to ask the question, but it seems necessary. She shakes her head.

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to keep you awake. I'll go back in a second." She closes her eyes, allowing herself to drift a bit with the fatigue before resigning back to her confinement.

"Sleep. I can take you back to your room after you fall asleep here. You won't know the difference." Her body stiffens, automatically, by instinct, yet her dark eyes open to stare at me, not as though I've done something wrong.

"You'd do that?" I nod.

"Yes. Go to sleep, Tifa." She smiles again. In the most comfortable fashion I know how, I shift again to allow her more of the sheets, to cover her spindly frame more adequately. She closes her eyes again, and after a minute her breathing slows.

"Are you going to stare at me the entire time?" Her voice surprises me. I find an old, familiar sensation in my head—the nervous embarrassment of not knowing how to respond. I don't like to admit that I also am tired, that the idea of sleep is the most appealing prospect in the middle of the night. I haven't lied to her—I will take her back to her room once I'm completely sure she'll sleep through the night without worrying what she'll see upon opening her eyes.

"You were staring at me before," I point out. There is not enough light to catch any significant flush in her cheeks. And suddenly, without warning or cause, I get a chill, a prompt string of cold running down the uncovered parts of my upper torso and limbs. And without warning or thought, I lie down. She moves over for me, and at her dwindled size, there is sufficient room on the couch for both of us to lie relatively comfortably. At this angle, her back to me, I can't see her face.

The chirps of crickets sing, echo through the city.

Her body adjusts, switches, turns over, to where we are now facing each other. I open my eyes to find hers, gazing at me in the darkness. The same anxious hesitation, sliding itself up between my ribs, choking out my breath. Tifa buries her nose in my shoulder, the top of her head just below my chin; I can feel her breath, warm, gentle, on the crook of my neck. And suddenly, it isn't so pressing that she return to her room so soon…

"You know what I want?" she asks, to my skin.

"What, Tif?"

One last hesitance.

"I want you to stay."

I find myself grinning; there _is_ humour in that. "You forget, Tif, I'm like you. I've got no other place to go." I can feel her heart beating in her chest, against my chest. She breathes with regularity, satisfied with my answer. I am content with it also; she's safe, for once wholly safe. I know, somewhere deep, that I won't leave. I can't. I don't want to.

That is all there is. I know. I don't need anything more.

It is enough.

* * *

I did it. Unbelievable. After a year anda half, my first published story is now _complete_. THANK YOU EVERYONE! You have no idea how happy this makes me, and I would never have gotten this far without all of your encouragement, 100 supportive reviews. I wish I could go through each individual person who reviewed and thank you personally, but there are so many, I couldn't possibly get to everyone; off the top of my head, I'd like to thank Kawaii-Tifa (she was my first review), The Extreme Piercing, Cloti, Althea17 (sorry for making you wait, dear—bet you thought this chapter would never come, huh?), Aoi-Butterfly...just to name a few. The list goes on. Hopefully, this final chapter wasn't too disappointing for any of you!  
For those of you who tried to guess, the tombstone is from Forrest Gump (Jenny's grave). Insert the appropriate disclaimers here. 

Once again, thank you thank you thank you. I might consider writing a sequel, if the inspiration strikes me, or if it seems to be in high demand (you be the judge). I think I'm up for the challenge...

Sincerely, Mako Raine


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